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HORACE 
GREELEY 



APPLETONS* SERIES OF 

HISTORIC LIVES. 



Father Marquette. 

By Reuben Gold Thwaites, Editor of "The 
Jesuit Relations," Third Edition. 

Daniel Boone. 

By Reuben Gold Thwaites. Third Edition. 

Horace Greeley. 

By William A. Linn, for many years Man- 
aging Editor of the " New York Evening 
Post." 

Sir William Johnson. 

By Augustus C. Buell, Author of "Paul 
Jones, Founder of the American Navy." [In 
preparation.^ 

Champlain. 

By Edwin Asa Dix. [In preparation.'] 

Sam Houston. 

By Prof. George P. Garrison, of the Univer- 
sity of Texas. [In preparation.] 

Sir William Pepperell. 

By Noah Brooks. [In preparation.] 



Each 12mo. Illustrated. $1.00 net. 
Postage. 10 cents additional. 



D. APPLETON AND COMPANY, NEW YORK. 




HORACE GREELEY IN 1872. 



Horace #reelep 

Founder and Editor of The New York 
Tribune 



BY 
WILLIAM ALEXANDER LINN 

Author of "The Story of the 
Mormons " 



Illustrated 




New York 
1903 



t-r^ 



o 



/v 



THE Library of j 

CCNCjI^ESS. ■ 

Two Copies Received 

MAR 6 'Q03 

C&pynghi hnlry 
CLASS g^ AXo. No 
COPY 8, ' 



COPTRIOHT, 1008 

By D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 



PuUished, March, 1903 



PREFACE 



Horace Greeley is remembered by the 
men of his own day as a great editor and a 
somewhat eccentric genius. While we like to 
hear about a man's personal characteristics, 
in studying his biography the lessons of a 
life like Greeley's are to be found in his 
works. "When a "gawky " country lad, with 
a limited education and a slight acquaintance 
with the printer's trade, comes to the princi- 
pal city of the land with a few dollars in his 
pocket and a single suit of clothes, and fights 
a fight the result of which is the founding of 
the most influential newspaper of his day, 
and the acquirement of a reputation as its 
editor which secures for him a nomination 
for the presidency of the United States — in 
such a man's career there must be material 
for useful study. And the place to study 
Horace Greeley is in his newspapers. He 
made these newspapers; he gave them their 
character; and, in doing so, he left on them 
his mental photograph. 

V 



Horace Greeley 



Such a study is most interesting. No 
other editor has ever given opportunity for 
it. Beginning his editorial labors when both 
the tariff and the slavery questions were qui- 
escent, we find in the files of the New Yorker, 
the Jeffersonian, the Log Cabin, and the 
New York Tribune, in order, an expression 
of the growing national interest in these sub- 
jects, and a discussion of them which pic- 
tures, better than any mere recital of results 
can do, the building up of a public sentiment 
that had so far-reaching results. This is es- 
pecially true of the slavery question ; because 
Greeley was not an early Abolitionist — not 
an Abolitionist at all, in the technical sense. 
He was one of those who were content to 
leave the South alone with its slavery as that 
institution was defined in the Federal Consti- 
tution and restricted by the Missouri Com- 
promise. But he was foremost in the ranks 
of those who called for the observance of that 
compromise, who refused to concede to the 
South new slave territory, and who assisted 
in arousing the national conscience to the 
pitch that made an armed attempt to save 
the Union in the sixties a possibility. 

Why this valiant warrior stepped aside 
into the ranks of the timid and the compro- 
misers when the issue was drawn, each reader 

vi 



Preface 

may decide for himself. Why he was not con- 
tent with his position and influence as an edi- 
tor, and sacrificed a good deal of consistency 
in an effort to reach the office of President, 
may also be left to the reader's opinion. His 
weaknesses throughout his editorial career 
are almost as marked as his strength, and a 
lack of foresight often played havoc with his 
judgment. An editor of large experience 
said, on the occasion of his death: "The ed- 
itor of a daily paper is the object of un- 
ceasing adulation from a crowd of those who 
shrink from fighting the slow and doubtful 
battle of life in the open field, and crave the 
kindly shelter of editorial plaudits, ^ puffs,' 
and * mentions ' ; and he finds this adulation 
offered freely, and by all classes and condi- 
tions, without the least reference to his char- 
acter or talents or antecedents. What won- 
der if it turns the heads of unworthy men, 
and begets in them some of the vices of the 
despots — their unscrupulousness, their cruel- 
ty, and their impudence ; what wonder, too, if 
it should have thrown off his balance a man 
like Mr. Greeley, whose head was not strong, 
whose education was imperfect, and whose 
self-confidence had been fortified by a brave 
and successful struggle with adversity." 
Of Greeley's honesty and purity of motive 
vii 



Horace Greeley 



there was never any question. In his days 
of poverty no suggestions of a Weed that he 
remain quiet about some matter in which he 
believed, but which was not on the popular 
side, had any influence with him. In the days 
of the slavery contest, when the business in- 
terests of his city were ready for almost any 
concessions to Southern customers, he defied 
the "priests of the god Cotton," as he called 
them, and rebuked them in most scathing 
terms. When the war was over, and the ques- 
tions of adjustment and reconstruction were 
to be solved, he took a stand immediately 
and openly in favor of pardon and renewed 
brotherhood which cost him the favor of 
thousands of old associates, and lost him an 
election to the United States Senate. How- 
ever much his judgment swayed, it never 
swayed "on that side fortune leans." 



Vlll 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER I 

PAOB 

Greeley's early years and first experiences as a compositor: 
New York city in 1831 — Parentage and farm life — 
His schooling — Opinions of a college education — Ap- 
prenticeship in Vermont — Appearance and dress — 
Views of country journalism — Amusements — A non- 
user of tobacco and liquor — Arrival in New York city . 1 

CHAPTER n 

Discouragements in New York city : Looking for a job — 
His first employment — Setting up in business — Sources 
of income — How the New Yorker was started — Early 
journalism in the United States — Scope of the new paper 
— Greeley as a poet — Subjects of editorial discussion — 
Financial views — His straits for money . , , .21 

CHAPTER HI 

Thurlow Weed's discovery : What attracted him to Gree- 
ley — Their first meeting — The Jeffersonian and the Log 
Cabin — Their character and features — Greeley's indus- 
try — Poor business management — Last of the New 
Yorker 40 

CHAPTER IV 

Founding of the Tribune : Greeley's preparation — ^Views 
on good journalism — Local competition — The first num- 

ix 



Horace Greeley 



PAGB 

ber — Growth of business — McElrath as publisher — Gree- 
ley's courage in printing the news — Attacks and coun- 
ter-attacks — The Cooper libel suits — Profits . . .56 

CHAPTER V 

Sources of the Tribune's influence : Its excellence as a 
newspaper — Some of Greeley's editorial associates — 
Getting news by express — Value of Greeley's " isms " — 
His connection with Pourierism — Later views on social- 
ism—The Graham diet— Margaret Fuller — What he be- 
lieved about spiritual rappings — His devotion to farm ( 
topics — In the lecture field — Some views on poets — His 
one term in Congress — The attention he attracted — His 
general supervision of his paper — An easy target for 
borrowers — Two editorial-room reminiscences , . 71 

CHAPTER VI 

The tariff question : Greeley's early sympathies — Legisla- 
tion between 1833 and 1844 — A statement of his tariff 
principles — His work for Clay in 1844 — Its effect on 
his health — Desire to try the issue four years later . 110 

CHAPTER VII 

Greeley's part in the antislavery contest: Acknowledg- 
ments of his influence — Why he was not an early Abo- 
litionist — His opinion of conservatism — Status of the 
slavery question during his early years — Need of arous- 
ing the Northern conscience — Illustrations of public 
feeling — Value of the Tribune as an ally — Greeley's 
views as set forth in the New Yorker — His aroused feel- 
ings — Influence of the Texas question — Effect of his 
devotion to Clay — Defense of Clay as a slaveholder — 
The Tribune's position stated — Disgust over Taylor's 
nomination — Defiance of the "business interests" of 
New York city — Position regarding the Compromise of 
1850 — Rejection of the fugitive slave law — No yielding 

X 



Contents 

PAGE 

to the " god Cotton " — The Kansas-Nebraska struggle 
and the John Brown raid — Organization of the Repub- 
lican party . . , 123 

CHAPTER Vni 

During the civil war: Greeley's weakness in a national 
crisis — His ambition to be Governor of New York — The 
story of his break with Seward and Weed — Lack of 
confidence in the Republican party movement — Course 
in the Chicago convention of 1860 — Weed's retaliation 
— Defense of the right of secession — The " On to Rich- 
mond " cry — Letter to Lincoln after the battle of Bull 
Run — Negotiations with Mercier — The "Prayer of 
Twenty Millions " — Opposition to Lincoln's renomina- 
tion — The Niagara Falls negotiations — A suppressed 
editorial — Final appreciation of the President . . 170 

CHAPTER IX 

Greeley's presidential campaign and death : The changed 
attitude of the Tribune toward Grant's administration 
— Causes of Republican discontent — Carpet-baggers 
and Kuklux — The demand for universal amnesty — 
Greeley's leadership in that cause — An opponent of 
President Johnson — Bondsman for Jefferson Davis — 
His Richmond speech — The Liberal movement in Mis- 
souri — Forerunnings of the Cincinnati convention — 
Sumner's influence — The demand for tariflE reform — 
Greeley's alliance with the Liberals — Proceedings of 
the Cincinnati convention — How Greeley's nomination 
was brought about — His retirement from the Tribune 
control — Progress of the campaign — His defeat and its 
effect on him — His last hours 214 



XI 



LIST OF ILLUSTKATIONS 



FACINO 
PAGE 



Horace Greeley 

Horace Greeley's birthplace . 

Park Row in 1830 

Facsimile extract from the New Yorker 
Greeley's house at Chappaqua 
Specimen of Greeley's handwriting 
Newspaper Row in 1870 
Statue in Greeley Square 



Frontispiece 



4 

23 

27 

93 

181 

234 

257 



ZIU 



HORACE GEEELEY 



CHAPTER I 

HIS EAELY YEAKS AND FIRST EMPLOYMENT AS A 
COMPOSITOR 

The country lad who went to New York 
city in the summer of 1831 to seek his fortune, 
arrived in what would now be called a good- 
sized town. The population of Manhattan Is- 
land (below the Harlem River) was only 
202,589 in 1830, as compared with the 1,850,- 
093 shown by the census of 1900; the total 
population of the district now embraced in 
Greater New York was then only 242,278, 
while in 1900 it was 3,437,202. The total 
assessed valuation of the city, real and per- 
sonal, in 1833, was only $166,491,542; in 
1900 it was, for the Borough of Manhattan, 
$2,853,363,382. No railroad then landed pas- 
sengers or freight in the city, no ocean steam- 
ers departed from the docks, and there was 
no telegraphic communication. Thirteenth 
Street marked the northern boundary of the 
settled part of Manhattan Island, and al- 
3 1 



Horace Greeley 



though, in 1828, lots from two to six miles dis- 
tant from the City Hall were valued at from 
only $60 to $700 each, more than one writer 
of the day was ready to concede that, owing 
to advantages of cheaper land on the oppo- 
site shores of Long Island and New Jersey, 
newcomers were likely to settle there before 
the city could count on a larger growth. We 
get an idea of the rural condition of the city 
in the announcement that the post-office (in 
Exchange Place) was open only from 9 a. m. 
to sunset; that the "elegant [dry goods] em- 
porium " of Peabody & Co. occupied a front- 
age of two windows under the American 
Hotel, at the northwest corner of Broadway 
and Barclay Street, the residences of Phillip 
Hone and another prominent citizen being sit- 
uated in the same block, and that Greenwich 
Village had not yet lost its character as a 
summer resort ; and, five years later, the New 
Yorker, in an article setting forth the growth 
of the city, said, " Her streets, lacking more 
direct appliances, have been sun-dried and 
rain-washed till they are passably, if hardly, 
respectable." 

This was the city on one of whose wharves 
an Albany boat landed Horace Greeley one 
summer morning. His equipment for a strug- 
gle for a living among entire strangers he 

2 



His Early Years 



has thus described : " I was twenty years old 
the preceding February; tall, slender, pale, 
and plain ; with ten dollars in my pocket, sum- 
mer clothing worth perhaps as much more, 
nearly all on my back, and a decent knowl- 
edge of so much of the art of printing as a 
boy will usually learn in the office of a coun- 
try newspaper." 

The Greeleys, for generations back, had 
not known affluence. Of Scotch-Irish stock, 
some of them had emigrated to America as 
early as 1640, and had fought the fight for 
a living as farmers or as blacksmiths. Hor- 
ace's father Zaccheus was a farmer, and the 
future journalist was born on his farm of 
fifty acres five miles from Amherst, N. H., 
on February 3, 1811. With the best of man- 
agement it would have been difficult to obtain 
from such a farm more than a living for the 
owner's family. The Greeleys did work hard, 
the mother sharing with her husband such 
labor as raking and loading hay, besides 
doing housework and carding and spinning, 
and Horace, when five years old, gave such 
assistance as riding the horse to plow before 
going to school for the day, and killing wire- 
worms in the corn. But the father was an 
easy-going rather than an energetic man. In 
those days whisky, rum, and cider were 

3 



Horace Greeley 



served even at the ordination of clergymen in 
parts of New England, and Zaccheus Gree- 
ley was never behind his neighbors in acts of 
hospitality. He was, his son has testified, " a 
bad manager," and always in debt, and his 
farm did not enable him to gain on his in- 
debtedness. In the hope of improving mat- 
ters, he let his own farm to a younger brother 
and rented a larger one near by. But the 
brother could not meet his engagements, and 
the family moved back in 1819. Sickness en- 
sued, a speculation in lumber proved disas- 
trous, and the end came in the summer of 
1820, when the home farm was seized by the 
sheriff at the instance of several creditors, _ 
the father took his departure to escape arrest 
for debt, and the farm and crops, when sold, 
left nothing for the wife and children. 
" When night fell," wrote the son in later 
years, " we were as bankrupt a family as well 
could be." Horace then had a brother, eight 
years old, and two sisters of six and four 
years; another sister was born in 1822. 

In the following January the Greeleys, 
with their effects packed in a two-horse sleigh, 
joined the father in Westhaven, Vt., where 
he had hired a house at a rental of $16 a year. 
There for two years the elder Greeley worked 
by the day at such jobs as he could secure, 

4 




Horace Greeley's birthplace. 



His Early Years 



the largest of these being the clearing of a 
fifty-acre tract of land. The two boys at- 
tended school in the winter months, but as- 
sisted their father in his laborious tasks the 
rest of the time. Cutting down trees was not 
the work for which boys of eight and ten were 
fitted; but they did what they could at that, 
and carried off the brush and drove the team. 
In the early spring they chopped away, stand- 
ing in slush knee-deep, and in summer they 
endured at night the torture of having the 
lances. of thistles dug out of their festered 
feet which they could not afford to protect 
with shoes. Seven dollars an acre, and half 
the wood, was to have been the recompense for 
this labor; but before the account was ad- 
justed their employer died, and a part of even 
this small emolument they never received. 
Next, the father, again with the sons' assist- 
ance, tried farming and running a sawmill on 
shares at the same time, and later he united 
land-clearing and farming — all without finan- 
cial success. This was the last of Horace 
Greeley's farm work as a boy. He had found 
in it "neither scope for expanding faculties, 
incitement to constant growth in knowledge, 
nor a spur to generous ambition." But he 
believed in farming on business principles, 
and it was his experience in these early years 

5 



Horace Greeley 



which led him, when in command of a great 
newspaper, to devote so much thought to a 
higher agriculture, and to write and speak so 
many words in behalf of intelligent land cul- 
ture. 

Any one who visits the neighborhood 
where the early days of a man afterward fa- 
mous have been spent will not fail to discover 
reminiscences of his youthful talent, and to 
unearth venerable predictions of his future 
greatness. This has been the case with Hor- 
ace Greeley, producing a kind of biography 
which he himself pronounced "monstrously 
exaggerated by gossip and tradition." In his 
early years he was very delicate, and the 
death of two children who had preceded him 
made his mother especially tender of him. 
She had a rare store of old-country traditions 
told to her by her Irish grandmother, and the 
child took an eager interest in these ; and an 
open book on his mother's knees while she 
spun so attracted him that when he was four 
years old he could read, and, from the manner 
of taking his lessons, it became indifferent to 
him whether the book was held sideways or 
even upside down. Before he was quite three 
years old he was sent to the district school 
from the house of his grandfather, which was 
nearer it than his home, and this school he 

6 



His Early Years 



attended most of the winter, and some of the 
summer, months during the next three years. 
He also attended the district school while they 
lived in Vermont, as circumstances per- 
mitted. The text-books in those days were 
as primitive as the teaching and the disci- 
pline, embracing Webster's Spelling-Book 
(just introduced). The American Preceptor 
as a reader, and Bingam's Ladies' Accidence 
as a grammar. Reviewing his school days, 
in his Recollections of a Busy Life, Greeley 
said: "I deeply regret that such homely sci- 
ences as chemistry, geology, and botany were 
never taught. Yet I am thankful that algebra 
had not yet been thrust into our rural com- 
mon schools, to knot the brains and squander 
the time of those who should have been learn- 
ing something of positive and practical 
utility." 

Horace was certainly a precocious child. 
He had read the Bible through, under his 
mother's guidance, when he was five years 
old. When he was four years old he was so 
good a speller that, in the weekly matches at 
school, in which sides were chosen, he would 
easily secure and retain the head of his side, 
but was so much a child that the "choosing " 
of the spellers had to be committed to some 
one else, because he always selected for his 

7 



Horace Greeley 




side the playmates whom he liked best, with- 
out regard to their spelling ability. All his 
schoolfellows testified in later years to his 
early love of books, and that not one of the 
few volumes which the neighborhood afforded 
escaped him, and they recalled also his inter- 
est in the weekly newspaper for which his 
father subscribed. The first book that Gree- 
ley owned was The Columbian Orator, given 
to him by an uncle when, five years old, he 
lay sick with the measles. At Westhaven, 
Vt., the Greeleys lived near the house of the 
landowner who gave them employment, and 
he allowed Horace access to his library; and 
thus, by the time the boy was fourteen years 
old, he had read the Arabian Nights, Robin- 
son Crusoe, Shakespeare, and some history. 

During the family's last year's residence 
in New Hampshire Horace's repute as a stu- 
dent induced a man of means to offer to send 
the lad, at his own expense, to Phillips Acad- 
emy at Exeter, and afterward to college. 
Some men, after going through such strug- 
gles as Greeley encountered, would have re- 
gretted in later years the loss of this oppor- 
tunity. Greeley did not. On the contrary, 
he expressed his thanks that his parents did 
not let him be indebted to any one of whom 
he had not a right to expect such a favor, and 

8 



His Early Years 



he was ever hostile to the education furnished 
by the colleges of the day. To a young man 
who wrote to him in 1852 for his advice about 
going to college, Greeley replied, "I think you 
might better be learning to fiddle," and in 
his Busy Life (1868) he said he would reply 
to the question, " How shall I obtain an educa- 
tion," by saying, "Learn a trade of a good 
master. I hold firmly that most boys may 
better acquire the knowledge they need than 
by spending four years in college." In an 
address at the laying of the corner-stone of 
the People's College at Havana, N. Y., in 
1858, he explained, however, that he did not 
denounce a classical course of study, but only 
"protested against the requirement of appli- 
cation to and proficiency in the dead lan- 
guages of all college students, regardless of 
the length of time they may be able to devote 
to study, and of the course of life they medi- 
tate." The founding of agricultural and tech- 
nical colleges, the opening of scientific depart- 
ments in our classical institutions, and the de- 
vice of optional courses are all concessions to 
the idea for which Greeley then contended. 

A lad disgusted with the hard labor and 
slight remuneration of farming and land- 
clearing, and with a decided literary taste, 
naturally looked, in those days, to the print- 

9 



Horace Greeley 



er's trade as a congenial occupation. News- 
papers Greeley had "loved and devoured " 
from the time when he had learned to read, 
and when he was eleven years old he induced 
his father to accompany him to a newspaper 
office in Whitehall, N. Y., where he had heard 
that there was an opening for an apprentice. 
But he was rejected as too young for the 
place. By the spring of 1826 his father had 
given up the fight for a living in New Eng- 
land, and decided to carry out a project he 
had long had in mind — a move to Western 
Pennsylvania. He bought a tract of four 
acres in Erie County, about three miles from 
Clymer, N. Y., on which was a log cabin with 
a leaky roof, in a wilderness, where the woods 
abounded with wild animals, and the forest 
growth was so heavy that he and his younger 
son were a month in clearing an acre. By 
additional purchases he in time increased his 
holding to some three hundred acres. The life 
of the family there was a discouraging one, 
and Horace says he never saw the old smile 
on his mother's face from the day she entered 
that log cabin to the day of her death in 1855. 
That spring, before the family moved, 
Horace saw an advertisement, stating that an 
apprentice was wanted in the office of the 
Northern Spectator at East Poultney, Vt-, 

10 



His Early Years 

and lie at once applied for tlie place. In all 
Ills early applications for work his personal 
appearance was an obstacle to his success. m 
His figure was tall and slender, and his head 
large and covered with a growth of yellowish, 
tow-colored hair, so light that it seemed al- 
most white with age. "Gawky" would de- 
scribe his general aspect. His carelessness 
about dress, which was a personal character- 
istic in after-life, and which he was some- 
times accused of cultivating with a view to 
effect,^ began with his boyhood, partly be- 

1 In his controversy with Cooper, the novelist, over the lat- 
ter's libel suits, in the early days of the Tribune, Greeley printed 
a report of an imaginary argument by Cooper in court, in 
which he made Cooper thus allude to his appearance : 
"Fenimore — 'Well, then, your Honor, I offer to prove by 
this witness that the plaintiff is tow-headed, and half bald at 
that ; he is long-legged, gaunt, and most cadaverous of 
visage — ergo, homely. ... I have evidence to prove the said 
plaintiff slouching in dress ; goes bent like a hoop, and so 
rocking in gait that he walks on both sides of the street at 
once.'" 

When, in 1844, Colonel James Watson Webb, in the 
Courier and Enquirer, accused Greeley of seeking notoriety 
by his oddity in dress, the Tribune retorted that its editor 
had been dressed better than any of his assailants could be if 
they paid their debts, adding "that he ever affected eccen- 
tricity is most untrue ; and certainly no costume he ever 
appeared in would create such a sensation on Broadway as 
that which James Watson Webb would have worn but for the 
clemency of Governor Seward " — an allusion to Webb's sen- 
tence for fighting a duel. 

11 



Horace Greeley 

cause he had no money with which to buy 
good clothes, and partly because he was in- 
different in the matter. A tattered hat, a shirt 
and trousers of homespun material, and the 
coarsest of shoes, without stockings, sufficed 
for his summer costume, and when, on his 
arrival in New York city, he added a linen 
roundabout, his appearance was so amusing 
that the boys jeered at him on the streets. 
The business manager of the Northern 
Spectator, when Horace asked him, "Do you 
want a boy to learn the trade I " thought it 
strange that so unpromising a subject should 
have conceived the idea of becoming a printer. 
But he found the lad intelligent, and was told 
by him that he "had read some," and that he 
understood what he had read ; so he sent him 
to the foreman. The latter also changed a 
first unfavorable impression to the opinion 
that they should give him a trial, and he was 
engaged. A few days later, he appeared at 
the office with his father, his worldly posses- 
sions tied up in a handkerchief, and entered 
into a verbal agreement to work for the con- 
cern until he was twenty-one years old, re- 
ceiving only his board for the first six months, 
and after that $40 a year in addition. This 
compensation was somewhat increased before 
he left Poultney, and out of his slender means, 

12 



His Early Years 



as afterward in New York, he always found 
some surplus to send to the struggling family 
in the Pennsylvania wilderness. It is inter- 
esting here to note that from the town of 
Poultney, Vt., came George Jones, who gave 
Henry J. Raymond his chief financial assist- 
ance in founding the New York Times, and 
long survived both Greeley and Raymond as 
controlling owner of the Times. 

Horace's experience in East Poultney was 
of the greatest educational value to him. 
There he first had access to a public library. 
He soon joined a debating club, of which the 
leading citizens of the town were members, 
and, without changing his working clothes or 
attempting oratory, he won a reputation as 
a cogent reasoner, and a speaker who was 
always sure of his facts. As there were only 
two or three workmen employed in the office, 
he had experience, not only in setting type, 
but in blistering his hands and laming his 
back assisting in running off the edition on 
an old-fashioned hand-press. His opportu- 
nity went further than this. Writing "com- 
positions " had not been one of the require- 
ments of the schools he had attended ; but the 
editor of the Northern Spectator was a Bap- 
tist clergyman, whose religious duties took up 
a good deal of his time, and the apprentice, 
13 



Horace Greeley 



when his taste for reading and his ability in 
debate became known, was entrusted with the 
selection of some of the miscellany for the 
paper, the condensation of news, and the 
preparation of occasional original para- 
graphs, which were often set up in type by 
him without first reducing them to manu- 
script form. 

This was that kind of practical education 
for which Greeley always contended, and it 
was excellent fundamental instruction for the 
future editor of a city daily. The place for 
a young man to begin in journalism is at the 
bottom — as a reporter, if he is employed on 
a daily newspaper, or a condenser and 
gleaner if news is not the leading feature of 
the journal he is helping to make. While 
Horace Greeley achieved his chief fame as a 
writer — a debater of principles — it would be 
a mistake not to recognize the fact that he 
was a good "all-around " newspaper man. 
His first journalistic attempts in New York 
city, as we shall see, illustrated this; his re- 
ports of legislative and congressional pro- 
ceedings and other matters demonstrated his 
skill as a reporter, and his close supervision 
of all the columns of the Tribune was made 
plain in the correspondence with his man- 
aging editor, Charles A. Dana, published 

14 



His Early Years 



after his death. He always felt a responsi- 
bility for the kind of journal that he gave to 
his subscribers. "I think that newspaper 
reading is worth all the schools in the coun- 
try," he told a committee of the House of 
Commons, of which Cobden was a member, 
when invited, in London in 1851, to give his 
views on "taxes on knowledge," and he was 
too honest to offer his readers anything less 
than the best that he could supply. Some ad- 
vice to a country editor, written by him in 
1860, could hardly be improved upon. His 
first principle laid down was that "the sub- 
ject of deepest interest to an average human 
being is himself ; next to that, he is most con- 
cerned about his neighbor." He therefore 
told his correspondent that, if he would make 
up at least half his paper of local news, se- 
cured by "a wide-awake, judicious corre- 
spondent in every village and township in 
your county, nobody in the county can long 
do without it. Make your paper a perfect 
mirror of everything done in your county that 
its citizens ought to know." This covers the 
whole ground of breadth and restriction. 
Next, he would have the editor take an active 
part in promoting all "home industries," in 
which he included local fairs and new busi- 
ness enterprises of all kinds. Thirdly, and 

15 



Horace Greeley 



lastly, lie says: "Don't let the politicians and 
aspirants of the county own you. . . . Re- 
member that — in addition to the radical 
righteousness of the thing — the taxpayers 
take many more papers than the tax con- 
sumers." The following of this advice would 
have made a success of many a journalistic 
experiment that has proved a failure. 

Greeley's interest in politics began with 
his early interest in newspapers, and he con- 
fesses that he was an " ardent politician " 
when he was not half old enough to vote. 
His newspaper apprenticeship gave him his 
first opportunity to share in political discus- 
sion, and aid in the work of a campaign. John 
Quincy Adams was President, Calhoun Vice- 
President, and Henry Clay Secretary of 
State when Greeley went to East Poultney, 
and public feeling was seething over the 
charge that there had been a corrupt bargain 
between Adams and Clay. In the national 
election of 1828 Calhoun was the candidate 
for Vice-President on the Jackson (Demo- 
cratic) ticket, and Adams and Rush headed 
the National Republican ticket. "We Ver- 
monters were all protectionists," wrote Gree- 
ley; the Northern Spectator was an Adams 
paper of the partizan type, and on election 
day Poultney gave Adams 334 votes and 

16 



His Early Years 



Jackson only 4. Greeley was also greatly 
interested in the Antimasonry political move- 
ment, sympathizing with the opponents of 
the secret order, and maintaining his oppo- 
sition to such organizations throughout his 
life. 

Diligent student as he was, Horace was 
not averse to amusements in those days. In 
his school and farming life, fishing was his 
favorite recreation, and in picturing an ideal 
rest, in his Busy Life, he suggested a party 
of congenial friends, camped on some coast 
islet or Adirondack lake, where fish or game 
could be had. He sometimes, when at Poult- 
ney, joined a party of bee-hunters, and occa- 
sionally took part in a game of ball, but ac- 
knowledged his inability "to catch a flying 
ball, propelled by a muscular arm straight at 
my nose." He in later years objected to base- 
ball matches between clubs of distant cities, 
and advocated giving the prize to the club 
that made the lowest score, as this demon- 
strated that these players attended better 
than their opponents to their business duties. 
Old acquaintances in Poultney said that he 
was fond of whist, checkers, and chess, and 
told of his defeating a locally famous checker 
player; but such games did not win his ad- 
miration, and he afterward advised persons 
3 17 



Horace Greeley 



of sedentary habits to shun them "because of 
their inevitable tendency to impair digestion 
and incite headache." He never witnessed a 
game of bilhards, but he recommends bowl- 
ing as an indoor exercise. 

Two rules of life Greeley had already 
formed when he reached New York — he was 
a non-user of intoxicants and tobacco. 
Neither of his parents, he says, was a total 
abstainer from the use of liquor, and both 
loved their pipe. But the son was made sick 
by smoking a half-burned cigar in his grand- 
father's house when not more than five years 
old, and from that time he looked on the use 
of tobacco in any form as "if not the most 
pernicious, certainly the vilest, most detest- 
able abuse of his corrupt sensual appetites 
whereof depraved man is capable." 

On January 1, 1824, young Greeley "de- 
liberately resolved to drink no more distilled 
liquors," and he kept this pledge thus made 
to himself when only thirteen years old, in 
a community where strong drink was as free 
as water, and nine years before the American 
Temperance Society declared for total absti- 
nence. Soon after he went to Poultney he 
assisted in organizing a temperance society, 
and, to make sure that his own years would 
not bar him from membership, he had a 
18 



His Early Years 



resolution adopted that members be received 
"when they were old enough to drink." 

The Northern Spectator was not a finan- 
cial success. It struggled on, however, under 
different ownerships, until June, 1830, when 
its publication was discontinued and the office 
was closed. Greeley left the town with en- 
larged information on many subjects, inclu- 
ding writing and speaking and the duties of 
newspaper editing. In the way of capital he 
had only $20 in cash and perhaps a few more 
clothes than he came into the town with. He 
went at once, part of the way on foot, to his 
parents' home, made a visit there of a few 
weeks, and then set out to seek work at his 
trade. He found employment at Jamestown 
and Gowanda, N. Y., and later began an en- 
gagement that lasted for seven months in the 
office of the Erie (Penn.) Gazette. Wherever 
he applied his personal appearance was still 
against him. The proprietor of the Gazette 
used to relate that when he entered the office 
and saw Greeley (who was waiting for him) 
reading some of the exchange newspapers, 
his first feeling was one of astonishment that 
a fellow so singularly "green " in his appear- 
ance should be reading anything. 

When the Gazette office no longer offered 
him employment, he tried to secure work in 
19 



Horace Greeley 



some of the neighboring towns, and, when 
this effort failed, made up his mind to look 
for a position in New York city. Accord- 
ingly, he again visited his parents, divided 
with them his cash, retaining only $25 for his 
own use, and with $10 of this sum, and his 
scanty wardrobe, he stepped from an Albany 
boat to a pier near "Whitehall Street early 
on the morning of Friday, August 18, 1831. 



20 



CHAPTER n 

FIRST EXPEEIENCES IN NEW YORK CITY — THE 
NEW YORKER 

Greeley soon satisfied himself with a 
stopping place, engaging a room and board 
for $2.50 a week with Edward McGolrick, who 
kept a grog-shop and boarding-house com- 
bined — a quiet, decent one — at No. 168 West 
Street ; and after breakfast he started out to 
look for work. He was as persistent in this, 
in the face of discouragement, as he was in 
every duty. For two days he tramped the 
streets, visiting two-thirds of the printing- 
offices in the city, always receiving a "No " 
to his question, " Do you want a hand ? " and 
incurring the accusation in one office of being 
a runaway apprentice. When Saturday night 
came he had satisfied himself that the city 
afforded him no hope of a living, and had 
decided to start for the country again on 
Monday, before his last dollar was spent. 

But this was not to be. Some young ac- 
quaintances of his landlord, who called on 
21 



Horace Greeley 



Sunday, told him of an office at No. 85 Chat- 
ham Street, where a compositor was wanted, 
and there Greeley betook himself on Monday 
morning so early that the place was closed 
when he arrived. So uncouth was the lad's 
appearance that here again he would prob- 
ably have been rejected had any one been at 
hand to undertake the work that was to be 
done. This was the putting in type of a small 
New Testament, with narrow columns, the 
text interspersed with references to notes 
marked by Greek and other letters. So com- 
plicated was this task, and so little could a 
man earn at it, paid by the ems set, that sev- 
eral compositors had abandoned it after a 
brief trial. This job the foreman offered to 
the country lad, confident that a half day 
would prove his incompetence to perform it. 
When the proprietor came in and saw Gree- 
ley at work, he inquired, "Did you hire that 
d — d foolf " adding, "For God's sake, pay 
him off to-night." But the foreman did not 
pay him off. The one thing this New Eng- 
lander, who had cleared land standing knee- 
deep in slush in the spring, and barefooted on 
thistles in summer, was not afraid of was 
hard work; the one thing he must have was 
an income sufficient to keep him alive. He 
set that Testament. When the foreman ex- 

22 




M 



P-i 



First Experiences in New York 

amined his first proof, lie found that the 
"d — d fool " had set more type and in better 
shape than any one else who had attempt- 
ed it. 

For two or three weeks the boy scarcely 
made his board, although he moved his quar- 
ters to a mechanics' boarding place near the 
office, and worked all the hours that were not 
given to his meals and to sleep ; but he gained 
in rapidity, and finally made $5 or $6 a week 
by working from twelve to fourteen hours a 
day, his "case " lighted at night by a candle 
stuck in a bottle. Naturally, the boys in the 
office played tricks on so promising a subject, 
but he took these without resentment, and the 
annoyance soon stopped, his good nature 
winning him friends. He was, even in that 
early year, a lender of money to his fellow- 
workmen, while he was denying himself 
everything outside of the bare necessities of 
life. The New Testament finished, he was 
out of work for a time, and was then as- 
signed to a "lean " job on a commentary on 
the Book of Genesis. Then came further 
tramping, and a discharge from one newspa- 
per office, tradition says, because he was not 
"decent looking," until he became so nearly 
discouraged that he seriously thought of try- 
ing some other form of employment. The 
23 



Horace Greeley 

idea of seeking work at the national capital 
occurred to him, but while he had employment 
he had treated himself to a suit of clothes 
— a second-hand suit of black, bought of a 
Chatham Street dealer, in which, he says, he 
found "no wear and little warmth " — and 
this had so depleted his capital that he had 
not money enough to pay his way to Wash- 
ington. In the following January, however, 
he found work in the office of the Spirit of 
the Times, which had just been started by 
W. T. Porter and James Howe, two newcom- 
ers from the country, with scant capital. 
This enterprise was a discouraging one from 
the start, but, while Greeley found it difficult 
to collect his wages, he also found opportu- 
nity to show his skill in writing articles for 
the paper, thus keeping in practise what he 
had learned in Vermont. Later in the year 
he secured employment in the office of J. S. 
Eedfield, afterward a prominent publisher, 
and remained there until he was induced to 
join a fellow printer in setting up a printing 
establishment of their own. That experiment 
came about in this way: 

Francis Story, the foreman of the Spirit 
of the Times composing-room, numbered 
among his acquaintances S. J. Sylvester, a 
leading seller of lottery tickets, and Dr. H. D. 

24 



First Experiences in New York 

Shepard, a medical student, who had about 
$1,500 in cash at command. Through Sylves- 
ter, Story counted on being able to secure 
the printing of the weekly Bank-Note Re- 
porter, and for Shepard he had in view the 
printing of a one-cent daily newspaper, which 
Shepard had decided to establish. With this 
business in sight, Story proposed to Greeley 
that they open a printing-office of their own, 
and, not without misgivings, Greeley finally 
consented. Between them they could count 
up less than $200 ; but they secured $40 worth 
of type on six months' credit, hired two 
rooms at No. 54 Liberty Street, and invested 
all their cash in the necessary equipment. 
Thence, on January 31, 1833, Dr. Shepard's 
Morning Post was issued. Finding no en- 
couragement for his one-cent scheme, he had 
fixed the price from the start at two cents; 
but as cheapness was to be the one quality 
that would induce people to buy a paper of 
which Greeley says, "it had no editors, no 
reporters worth naming, no correspondents, 
and no exchanges even," it was a certain fail- 
ure, and it died when two weeks and a half 
old. The one-cent Sun came nine months 
later, and came to stay. 

The firm of Greeley & Story lost about 
$50 through Dr. Shepard, but this did not 
25 



Horace Greeley 



bankrupt them. A purchaser was found for 
some of the Morning Post's equipment, the 
Bank-Note Reporter gave them a little in- 
come, and they secured the printing of a tri- 
weekly paper called the Constitutionalist, 
whose local habitation was in Delaware, and 
which was the organ of the lottery interest. 
Lottery-ticket selling was a reputable busi- 
ness in those days, and Greeley not only 
printed the dealers' organ, but was a con- 
tributor to it, one of his articles being a de- 
fense of lotteries when an outcry arose 
against them because of the suicide of a 
young man who had lost all his property in 
tickets. When his assistance was not re- 
quired in his own shop, Greeley would work 
as a substitute compositor in a newspaper 
office near by, and he was making fair if slow 
progress in the world, when, in July, 1833, 
Story was drowned while bathing in the East 
Eiver. His place in the firm was taken by 
Jonas Winchester, and the business contin- 
ued so prosperously that in 1834 Greeley had 
the courage to think seriously of starting a 
newspaper of which he should be the editor. 
That he had made something of a mark in the 
local newspaper world is shown by the fact 
that he was at this time invited by James Gor- 
don Bennett to become interested with him in 

26 




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Facsimile extract from tlie New Yorker. 



First Experiences in New York 

starting a daily paper to be called the New 
York Herald. This offer was declined, but the 
idea of a paper of his own was carried out, and 
on March 22, 1834, appeared the first number 
of the weekly known as the New Yorker. 
Greeley was its editor; his partner confining 
himself to the business of the job-office. 

The people of this country early mani- 
fested a demand for newspapers, and, as set- 
tlements were pushed farther West, a local 
paper would spring up, sometimes before the 
stumps were removed from the new clearing. 
A usual plan was for a printer to issue a 
prospectus and ask for subscribers. If he 
secured sufficient encouragement, he might 
act as his own editor, or, more probably 
(as was the case with the Northern Specta- 
tor), engage some person of a literary bent 
to devote a part of his time to the editorial 
room. De Tocqueville, in 1835, wrote: "The 
number of periodicals and occasional publi- 
cations which appear in the United States 
actually surpasses belief. There is scarcely 
a hamlet which has not its own newspaper." ^ 

^ The number of newspapers and periodicals in the United 
States in 1838 was estimated at 863, with an annual issue of 
over 68,000,000, while the census of 1840 showed 1,403, with 
a yearly issue of 195,838,073 copies. New York State reported 
161 in 1828, and 245 in 1840. 

27 



Horace Greeley 



But he found that "the most distinguished 
classes of society are rarely led to engage in 
these undertakings"; and that "the journal- 
ists of the United States are usually placed 
in a very humble position, with a scanty edu- 
cation and a vulgar turn of mind." When 
John (afterward Lord) Campbell eked out 
his income in London, in the first years of 
the nineteenth century, by reporting parlia- 
mentary debates, the calling was so discredit- 
able that he concealed his avocation from his 
fellow law students. Dr. Oliver Wendell 
Holmes let it be understood that it would 
have hurt him professionally had it been 
known that he was a "literary man " when 
he began writing. 

Of the literary taste of New York city 
in 1828, a writer in the Picture of New York 
said: "Most of the periodical works attempt-, 
ed in this city have proved abortive in a few 
years. The population is so nearly commer- 
cial that the largest portion of the public at- 
tention is monopolized by the newspapers of 
the day." Whether Greeley had gaged the 
literary taste of New York by this measure 
and hoped to improve it, we do not know. 
He never exhibited long-headedness in busi- 
ness matters, and may have been guided by 
an ambition to edit a creditable literary jour- 

28 



First Experiences in New York 

nal rather than by any careful estimate of its 
possible financial success. 

Greeley planned to combine in his New 
Yorker "literature, politics, statistics, and 
general intelligence." His success in making 
a good paper of his initial venture was a 
sufficient proof of his editorial ability. What 
the New Yorker was he made it almost un- 
aided. In his farewell address to his sub- 
scribers, in 1841, when the paper was merged 
with the Weekly Tribune, he said: "The edi- 
torial charge of the New Yorker has from 
the first devolved on him who now addresses 
its readers. At times he has been aided in 
the literary department by gentlemen of de- 
cided talent and eminence [including Park 
Benjamin,^ C. H. Hoffman, and R. W. Gris- 
wold] ; at others the entire conduct has rested 
with him." A glance at the file of this jour- 
nal will show what a capacity for work its 

^ Henry J. Eaymond, in a letter to R. W. Griswold, from 
Burlington, Vt., October 31, 1839, said : "I am sorry Benja- 
min has left the New Yorker. If he had exerted himself but 
a little he could have made that infinitely the best weekly 
in the United States. Who will Greeley associate with him ? 
I hope (but do not expect) that he will get one to fill B.'s 
place. The Sentinel here a few weeks since undertook to use 
up Benjamin instanter on account of his critique of Irving. 
I gave it a decent rap for it in the Free Press, and since that 
they have let B. alone and gone to pommeling me." 

29 



Horace Greeley 

editor liad.^ Beginning as a folio, it was pub- 
lished in both folio and quarto form after 
March, 1836, the folio being issued on Satur- 
day mornings and the quarto (of sixteen 
pages) on Saturday afternoons. Taking as 

^ Greeley's idea of what a man should do in the way of 
newspaper work in those days was thus set forth in a letter to 
B. F. Randolph, dated May 3, 1836 : " I want the whole con- 
cern, printing-office included, to belong to you and I, and to 
be entirely managed between us. I want you to take com- 
mand at the publication office, and, in a short time, reduce the 
whole business to a system. Thus far our business depart- 
ment has been but half attended to, and the consequence is 
that we have lost a great deal by bad agents, runaway sub- 
scribers, etc. To remedy this it requires a man steadily at 
the publication office who not only knows what business is, 
but feels a deep interest in the prosperity of the concern. It 
needs some one who knows every agent and the state of his 
account familiarly, and who can almost repeat the names of 
the subscribers from memory. To do this he must make all 
the entries in the books himself and keep the accounts ; but as 
the new subscribers will not probably exceed 100 per week, the 
discontinuances 25 or 30, and the changes as many more, I 
believe all the business, including the making out of the bills 
(excepting, of course, the writing of mails, which is done by 
a clerk), might well be done by a thorough appropriation of 
five hours per day — at least after one had become practically 
familiar with it. As I should still have to do a share of the 
outdoor business, besides taking entire charge of the printing- 
office, I should expect you to assist me in the editorial man- 
agement — at first in the easier portion of it, such as examin- 
ing exchange papers, and taking entire charge of the city and 
domestic news; afterward, as experience in these departments 
and system in the other would allow you more time to do so, 
in the more especially literarv department of the paper." 

30 



First Experiences in New York 

a fair example the quarto of March 26, 1836, 
we find, first, eight pages devoted to original 
and selected poems; the first of a series of 
Letters of a Monomaniac; a description of a 
visit to the King of Greece, and prose selec- 
tions from home and foreign sources; then 
come two pages of editorial and political mat- 
ter; a little over a page devoted to a report 
of the proceedings of Congress; reviews of 
new books; the latest foreign and domestic 
news (particular attention being given to the 
politics of the different States), and the last 
page occupied with the words and music of 
Meet Me by Moonlight, "written and com- 
posed by J. Augustin Wade, Esq." The space 
given to the proceedings of Congress, to 
State politics, and to tabulated election re- 
turns gave every indication of the political 
bent of the editor, and his appreciation of 
the value of news was shown by the frequent 
additions of "postscripts " to the folio edi- 
tion, giving intelligence received by the mails 
after the first edition had gone to press. In 
later years the literary pages contained orig- 
inal stories — Dickens's Barnaby Rudge being 
printed as a serial (appearing also in the 
Tribune) — and increased space was devoted 
to book reviews. In an article contesting an 
argument that the best British writers of the 
31 



Horace Greeley 



day were superior to the best American wri- 
ters, the editor thus expressed his opinion 
of Disraeli: 

''Himself an open libertine in life, we re- 
gard his works as among the most mon- 
strously absurd, and at the same time abom- 
inably pernicious, of the distorted and de- 
praved pictures of fashionable description in 
European high life that we ever unsuccess- 
fully attempted to endure to the end." 

Greeley contributed to the New Yorker 
and to other periodicals of the day a number 
of poems over his initials. They were of 
varied merit, some of them showing quite as 
much of the poetic "fire " as do current poet- 
ical contributions of our own day. A single 
quotation — the last of some verses On the 
Death of TVilliam TMrt — must suffice : 

Then take thy long repose 

Beneath the shelter of the deep green sod ; 
Death but a brighter halo o'er thee throws — 

Thy fame, thy soul alike have spurned the clod — 
Rest thee in God. 

But Greeley never considered himself a 
poet, and when, in 1869, Eobert Bonner pro- 
posed to print a volume of poems not to be 
found in Dana's Household Handbook of 
Poetry, Greeley sent him a letter saying: 
"Be good enough — you must — to exclude 7ne 
" 32 



First Experiences in New York 

from your new poetic Pantheon. I have no 
business therein — no right and no desire to 
be installed there. I am no poet, never was 
(in expression), and never shall be." 

The reader of to-day, who had only a file 
of the New Yorker for his Uterary entertain- 
ment, would find it both interesting and in- 
structive. The editorial articles discussed a 
wide range of subjects with clearness and 
precision, and an exacting editor of a modern 
metropolitan journal would find in their form 
little that would call for revision. The editor 
had those prime qualifications for success in 
his calling — ideas to express and the power 
of expressing them. His views might at times 
be erratic and provoke much dissent, but this 
did not mean that he would not command an 
audience. As illustrations of the scope of his 
discussion it may be mentioned that he vigor- 
ously attacked the franking abuse; opposed 
all labor combinations, either of masters or 
journeymen, to regulate compensation, ex- 
cept the establishment of a unifonn scale of 
wages, to be followed in the absence of an 
agreement to the contrary; expressed a wish 
for the independence of Texas, but opposed 
its annexation as likely to cause foreign com- 
plications, and because "our territoiy is am- 
ple " ; objected to the expenditure of the 



Horace Greeley 



Treasury surplus (in 1836) on armaments 
and fortifications, believing that a railroad 
from Portland to New Orleans would serve 
the better purpose of assisting in the concen- 
tration of "the true safeguard against inva- 
sion — the muskets of our citizen soldiers " ; 
proposed the formation of associations in 
the city to enforce the law against houses of 
ill-fame; and, when rents were advanced 
downtown, urged the building of railroads 
from the Exchange, the park, and the Bat- 
tery to the Harlem River, in order to make 
the upper part of the island accessible; op- 
posed the forcible removal of the Creeks and 
Cherokees from their homes in the southern 
Atlantic States; and, while maintaining that 
the United States Government was right in 
its claim regarding the northeastern bound- 
ary, deprecated war and proposed arbitra- 
tion. 

Greeley's view of "clean " journalism was 
well set forth in an article in April, 1841, 
in which he condemned the spreading of de- 
tails of crime before newspaper readers, say- 
ing: "We weigh well our words when we say 
that the moral guilt incurred, and the violent 
hurt inflicted upon social order and individ- 
ual happiness by those who have thus spread 
out the loathsome details of this most damn- 



First Experiences in New York 

ing deed [a murder] are tenfold greater 
than those of the miscreant himself." He 
was an opponent of the spoils system, char- 
acterizing political removals (in 1837) as 
"calculated to corrupt and demoralize the 
public sentiment." 

The two great questions with which Gree- 
ley's name was afterward so intimately as- 
sociated — the tariff and slavery — were at- 
tracting little attention during the first years 
of the New Yorker, and their treatment by 
him at that time will be shown in later chap- 
ters. The great subject of public interest was 
the finances, State and national. The propo- 
sition to establish a United States Bank, the 
removal of the Federal deposits, the distribu- 
tion of the public funds among the States, 
Harrison's defeat by Van Buren, the expan- 
sion of the paper currency by the issues of 
the many new banks throughout the country, 
and the panic of 1837, all came within the 
scope of the New Yorker's editorials. In 
New York State, before the year 1838, bank 
charters were granted only as the Legisla- 
ture thought fit. "Accustomed as we are to 
the spoils system of to-day," says Horace 
White, "it sounds oddly to read that bank 
charters were granted by Whig and Democrat- 
ic Legislatures only to their own partizans. 
35 



Horace Greeley 

Not only was this the common practise, but 
shares in banks, or the right to subscribe to 
them, were parceled out to political ' bosses ' 
in the several counties." There was opposi- 
tion to all banks in the agricultural counties, 
and the laboring classes were generally hos- 
tile to paper money.^ The New Yorker 
fought steadily for free banking and for a 
redeemable paper currency. It expressed a 
hope that the agriculturist would be found 
"firmly united in spurning an unnatural and 
ruinous alliance with the mustering legions 
of agrarianism," and it combated the theory 
that money should be made only of the pre- 
cious metals. Under the free banking system 
that it favored no persons were to be allowed 
to issue notes "in excess of their actual cap- 
ital (or, better, only to equal three-quarters 
of this capital), in specie, or property readily 

' A meeting in tho City Hall Park, in March, 1837, called to 
consider the high prices of the necessaries of life, adopted a 
report which said : " There is another great cause of high 
prices, so monstrous in its nature that we could hardly credit 
its existence were it not continually before us — we mean the 
curse of Paper Money. Gold and silver are produced from the 
earth by labor; they are, or ought to be, earned from the pro- 
ducer by labor. No man nor combination can by Christian 
means collect a sufficiency of these metals to enable him to 
engross the food, fuel, or houses of a nation ; but a leagued 
band of paper-promise coiners exert absolute control over the 
whole wealth of the country." — (New Yorker, March 18, 1837.) 

3G 



First Experiences in New York 

convertible into specie." Some of its finan- 
cial recommendations were novel. Thus, in 
1836, it suggested that each railroad, canal, 
and similar corporation be empowered to 
issue notes to the amount of two-thirds the 
value of its completed enterprise, "these 
notes to constitute a special lien on the work 
itself, taking precedence of all other claims." 
At the time of the suspension of payments 
by the New York city banks, in 1837, the New 
Yorker defended them warmly, charging the 
troubles to the Northwest, and on the day of 
the suspension it offered three-per-cent pre- 
mium "on every New York city bill mailed 
to our address before the first of June." 
Considering the editor's financial status at 
that time, this was a good deal like Daniel 
Webster's offer to pay the national debt. In 
February, 1838, as a means of obviating the 
necessity of both a National Bank and State 
banks, the New Yorker proposed the issue of 
$100,000,000 in Treasury notes, by the Fed- 
eral Government, bearing one-per-cent inter- 
est, receivable for all dues, and redeemable 
"in public lands at cash prices." The Sub- 
treasury scheme it constantly opposed. 
From these excerpts it is evident that the 
possession of "views " on public questions 
and boldness in advocating them were an 
37 



Horace Greeley 



early, as well as a late, characteristic of 
Horace Greeley. 

Beginning with less than a dozen sub- 
scribers, the New Yorker gained steadily in 
circulation at the rate of about one hundred 
a week, until, in 1836, its subscribers num- 
bered 7,500. Unfortunately, many of these 
readers did not pay for their subscriptions. 
The paper had agents all over the country 
(a list of them fills two columns of one num- 
ber) who sent in the names of subscribers, 
but in many cases did not accompany these 
names with the cash. Greeley lived with the 
utmost frugality — the life of a miser, as he 
once expressed it to Thurlow Weed — and for 
two years was obliged to look to his job-office 
for his income. Then, the paper having a 
fair prospect, he gave over the job-office en- 
tirely to his partner, and took the charge of 
the paper on himself. In 1836, when he was 
married, he thought that he was worth 
$5,000, and that he could safely count on an 
income of $1,000 a year. But the panic of 
1837 came, and his books began to show a 
weekly loss of $100, He had given notes for 
his white paper, and he had used up some 
three thousand subscriptions paid in ad- 
vance. Earnest appeals to the delinquents 
appeared in the paper: "Friends of the New 

38 



First Experiences in New York 

Yorker! Patrons! We appeal to you, not 
for charity, but for justice. Whoever among 
you is in our debt, no matter how small the 
sum, is guilty of a moral wrong in withhold- 
ing the payment. We bitterly need it. We 
have a right to expect it." Greeley had a 
horror of debt, but he felt that he must keep 
up the struggle. One loan of $500 saved him 
from bankruptcy, and he would sometimes 
pay $5 for the use of $500 over Sunday.^ "If 
any one would have taken my business and 
my debts off my hands, upon my giving him 
my note for $2,000, I would have jumped at 
the chance," he said in later years, "and tried 
to work out the debt by typesetting, if noth- 
ing better offered." 

Something better offered. 

' Greeley wrote to a friend on July 29, 1835 : " I paid off 
everybody to-night, had $10 left, and have |3oO to raise on 
Monday. Borrowing places all sucked dry. I shall raise it, 
however." 



39 



CHAPTER III 

THURLOW weed's DISCOVEEY — THE JEFFERSO- 
NIAN AND THE LOG CABIN 

Up in Albany another man who was at 
that time editing a newspaper had a fight on 
his hands, not so desperately against over- 
due notes as against a most powerful polit- 
ical opposition. That man was Thurlow 
"Weed, and his opposition, known as "The 
Albany Regency," included such leaders as 
Martin Van Buren, William L. Marcy, and 
Silas "Wright. Weed had founded the Albany 
Evening Journal in March, 1830, and for sev- 
eral years had not only written all its edi- 
torial articles, but had reported the legisla- 
tive proceedings, selected the miscellany, col- 
lected the local news, read the proofs, and 
sometimes made up the forms for the press. 
His fight in the first presidential campaign 
after his paper was founded (in 1832) ended 
in the loss of the State and the nation by his 
candidate, Henry Clay, and Marcy defeated 
Seward for Governor the year following. 

40 



Thurlow Weed's Discovery 

The Whig party, as the National Republi- 
cans had come to be called, was stunned by 
these defeats, and when Harrison ran against 
Van Buren in 1836, Van Buren carried forty- 
two of the fifty-six counties of New York 
State, Massachusetts wasted her vote on "Web- 
ster, and Van Buren carried New England 
and had a popular majority over his three 
opponents. But the Whigs were now to have 
as an ally the influence most potent, perhaps, 
in the politics of a republic — a financial panic 
and an era of hard times. How potent this 
influence is in shaping the fortunes of parties 
and candidates the history of the United 
States has proved in later years. On Presi- 
dent Van Buren was laid the responsibility 
for the long list of business failures, the 
monetary evils, and the commercial stagna- 
tion. "What constitutional or legal justifi- 
cation can Mr. Van Buren offer to the people 
of the United States for having brought upon 
them all their present diflSculties 1 " was the 
language of a remonstrance drawn up by a 
committee of New York city merchants, in 
April, 1837. In the following November the 
Whigs (in an "off-year ") carried New York 
city for the first time, as well as county after 
county in the State that had been considered 
Democratic beyond attack, and elected 100 
41 



Horace Greeley 



of the 128 members of the Assembly voted 
for. 

Weed and his associates in the Whig 
party leadership saw in this change of public 
feeling hope of electing a Whig Governor in 
New York in 1838, as well as a Whig Presi- 
dent in 1840, and they looked on a cheap 
weekly newspaper, which would vigorously 
espouse their cause and keep the voters in- 
formed and stirred up, as a necessary part 
of their campaign equipment. 

"In looking about for an editor," says 
Weed in his autobiography, "it occurred to 
me that there was some person connected 
with the New Yorker possessing the qualities 
needed for our new enterprise. In reading 
the New Yorker attentively, as I had done, 
I felt sure that its editor was a strong tariff 
man, and probably an equally strong Whig. 
I repaired to the office in Ann Street where 
the New Yorker was published, and inquired 
for its editor. A young man with light hair 
and blond complexion, with coat off and 
sleeves rolled up, standing at the case, 
* stick ' in hand, replied that he was the ed- 
itor, and this youth was Horace Greeley." 

Greeley accompanied Weed and a mem- 
ber of the Whig State Committee, who was 
with him, to their hotel, where, after the nec- 

42 



Tliurlow Weed's Discovery 

essary explanations, it was arranged that 
Greeley should edit at Albany a small weekly 
paper to be called the Jeffersonian, for 
which service he was to receive $1,000 a year, 
the expense of the publication to be met by 
some Whigs of means. Only a man of Gree- 
ley's indomitable energy and willingness to 
work to the utmost limit of his strength 
would have undertaken this task in addition 
to the labor of editing the New Yorker. He 
understood that he would be obliged to spend 
nearly all his time in Albany when the Legis- 
lature was in session, and half his time in 
summer; and as Albany was not then con- 
nected with New York by rail, the trip there 
and back, to a tired man, was no small un- 
dertaking. But Greeley did not even ask 
time to consider the matter. His first trip to 
the State capital was made in a sleigh, and 
of his routine he wrote seven years later: "I 
regularly went up to Albany Saturday night, 
made up my paper there by Tuesday night, 
took the boat down and got out my New 
Yorker by Friday; then prepared copy for 
part of my next number, and caught my 
valise for Albany again." As a further illus- 
tration of his industry, we find this remark 
in his Busy Life: "As my small [Albany] 
paper did not require all my time, I made 
43 



Horace Greeley 



condensed reports of the Assembly debates 
for the Evening Journal, and wrote some ar- 
ticles for its editorial columns." 

The political friendship — partnership, it 
has been called — thus begun between Weed 
and Greeley lasted until 1854, or, so far as 
Weed was concerned, until the nomination of 
Lincoln in 1860. Their usefulness as co- 
workers can not easily be overestimated. 
Weed was the cool, calculating, far-seeing pol- 
itician, who would leave unsaid or undone 
what it was right to say or to do, if this 
would favor his party's success, and who 
worked for ends, without a constant criticism 
of means. Greeley was not nearly so far- 
seeing in political matters as he was credited 
with being, but he was desperately honest in 
his convictions, and eminently fitted to give 
them expression. As illustrations of Weed's 
foresight may be recalled his advice against 
the defeat of Van Buren's nomination to the 
English mission because this was likely to 
make him the candidate for Vice-President, 
as it did. Weed urged Webster to take the 
nomination for Vice-President on the Harri- 
son, and again on the Taylor ticket, but in 
vain; if Webster had followed this advice, 
his ambition to be President would have been 
gratified. Weed personally favored a United 
44 



Thurlow Weed's Discovery- 
States Bank, but he would not print in the 
Evening Journal, in 1836, Webster's speech 
at a Whig mass meeting, in Boston, in sup- 
port of the bank scheme, and against Jack- 
son's veto, sajdng that two sentences in the 
veto message would carry ten votes against 
the bank to one gained for it by Webster's 
eloquence — viz., that our Government "was 
endangered by the circumstance that a large 
amount of the stock of the United States 
Bank was owned in Europe," and that the 
bank was designed "to make the rich richer 
and the poor poorer." 

Weed has been severely criticized for the 
defeat of Clay in the National Convention of 
1839. Clay received early assurance that 
Weed was "warmly and zealously " in favor 
of his election, and Shepard, in his Martin 
Van Buren, says that "the slaughter of 
Henry Clay had been effected by the now 
formidable Whig politicians of New York, 
cunningly marshaled by Thurlow Weed." 
Weed did work against the election of Clay 
delegates to the convention, but he did so be- 
cause he foresaw that Clay would probably 
be defeated at the polls, and that there was a 
good chance of Harrison's election; and he 
proved himself a wise friend of Clay by ur- 
ging him, in the campaign of 1844, to write 
45 



Horace Greeley 



no letters, advice that was disregarded with 
disastrous consequences. Greeley who, as he 
expressed it, "profoundly loved Henry 
Clay," and looked for his nomination, de- 
fended Weed in this matter in his Busy Life, 
years after their political partnershipwas dis- 
solved, saying, "If politics do not meditate the 
achievement of beneficent ends through the 
choice and use of the safest and most effect- 
ive means, I wholly misapprehend them." 

But while Greeley would not urge the 
nomination of his own favorite when he 
thought that favorite would be a weak candi- 
date, he would not follow Weed in his views 
of expediency. Thus we find him saying, in 
one of his early letters to Weed: "I think you 
take the wrong view of the political bearing 
of this matter, though I act ivithout reference 
to that " (the italics are his), and Weed was 
powerless to repress Greeley's advocacy of 
what he considered vagaries in the Tribune. 

Weed says that he found Greeley in 
the early years of their acquaintance, when 
they were most intimate, "unselfish, conscien- 
tious, public-spirited, and patriotic. He had 
no habits or taste but for work — steady, 
indomitable work." ^ The young man was at 

* Lewis Gaylord Clark, in the Knickerbocker, said of Gree- 
ley : " A man careless, it mav be. of the style of his dress, pre- 

'46 



Thurlow Weed's Discovery 

that time by no means unknown out of his 
own office in New York city. He had taken 
as practical an interest in political meetings 
as his time would allow, and had so far over- 
come the feeling of ridicule with which his 
first appearance had been greeted, that he 
had been offered (and declined) a place on 
the city Assembly ticket. His pen, too, was 
in demand, and for editorial contributions to, 
and for a time the practical supervision of, 
the Daily Whig, a short-lived journal, he re- 
ceived a salary of $12 a week.^ 

The first number of the Jeffersonian was 
issued on February 17, 1838, with Horace 
Greeley's name as editor under the title. Its 
prospectus announced its purpose to be "to 
supply a notorious and vital deficiency — to 
furnish counties and neighborhoods not 
otherwise provided with correct and reliable 
information upon political subjects," at a 

ferring comfort to fashion, but yet of scrupulous cleanliness in 
person and habiliments always; possessing a benevolent heart, 
and 'clothed with charity as with a garment'; frank and fear- 
less in the expression of his opinions, whether such opinions are 
to be praised or execrated ; of infatigable industry, and unpre- 
tending, kindly manners — this is Horace Greeley." 

* Greeley, in a letter to R. W. Griswold dated March 18, 
1839, said : " I think better of my new pet, the Whig. I write 
the editorial for that, and edit it generally. Don't you think 
it better than formerly? If not, it's wretched bad, that's a 
fact. It is rather gaining in patronage." 

47 



Horace Greeley 



price within tlie reach of all (six subscrip- 
tions for $3). It was not to be a mere party 
organ, but would print the views of public 
men on both sides. The Jeffersonian was 
an eight-page quarto, containing usually a 
page of editorial discussion, the text of im- 
portant speeches in Congress, reports of the 
proceedings of Congress and of the Legisla- 
ture, and a summary of general news. The 
modern reader would pronounce it dull, with 
its columns of speeches and by no means 
"sparkling" editorials. One of the notable 
contrasts between the political journals of 
those days and of the present is found in the 
vastly greater importance which editors then 
attributed to speeches at Washington and 
Albany. The editor in the thirties and for- 
ties placed such matter, as well as full re- 
ports of legislative business, at the head of 
his list of "reliable information upon polit- 
ical subjects." Nowadays the compliment of 
printing in full a speech made in Congress 
or the Legislature is rarely paid, and the 
largest daily papers do not give a complete 
summary of the proceedings of Congress, al- 
lowing their special correspondents to serve 
up to their readers only the most entertain- 
ing subjects. 

Greeley was a member of the Young 
48 



Thurlow Weed's Discovery- 
Men's Whig State Committee, and after the 
nominations were made, the Jeffersonian 
warmed up to its campaign work. Here is 
one of its appeals to the Whigs of New York : 
"The eyes and the hopes of the Union 
are now upon New York. The Empire 
State must determine the great question at 
issue between the People and the Usurpers. 
She is the last and only barrier between 
Feeedom and Despotism. She must breast 
the shock alone." The Whigs carried New 
York State by 15,000 and elected Seward Gov- 
ernor in 1838 by about 38,000, and as the 
15,000 copies of the Jeffersonian circulated 
principally among readers who had no other 
paper, Greeley's modest assumption that "it 
did good " will not be disputed. The suspen- 
sion of the publication was announced in the 
issue of February 9, 1839. 

In the next two years the Whig cause did 
not flourish, almost all the States which voted 
in 1839 showing a return to the Democrats, 
New York remaining Whig by a reduced ma- 
jority. Harrison received the nomination for 
President in the first Whig National Conven- 
tion, in 1839, and one of the most exciting 
campaigns in the history of the country fol- 
lowed. "Give Harrison a log cabin and a 
barrel of hard cider, and he will stay con- 
5 49 



Horace Greeley 



tented in Ohio, and not aspire to the presi- 
dency," was the unfortunate sneer of a 
Democratic editor. From that day "log 
cabin " and "hard cider " became Whig rally- 
ing cries, and successful ones, as the result 
proved. 

Greeley's editorship of the Jeffersonian 
had so satisfied the party managers at Al- 
bany — and shrewder ones never held council 
— that they selected him to conduct a Harri- 
son campaign paper, to be published in New 
York city, and to be called the Log Cabin. 
The first number of this paper — a folio, 15 by 
28 inches — dated New York and Albany, ap- 
peared on May 2, 1840, the title line contain- 
ing a picture of a log cabin, with a cider bar- 
rel beside it, and a Harrison-Tyler flag wa- 
ving in front. The subscription price was 
fifty cents for six months, or seven copies for 
three dollars ; single copies costing two cents. 
The publishers described it as "a political 
and general newspaper, to be devoted to the 
dissemination of truth, the refutation of slan- 
der and calumny, and the vindication, by fair 
and full citations from the recorded history 
of our country, of the character and fame of 
one of her noblest and most illustrious patri- 
ots" (Harrison). 

The Log Cabin was a lively campaign 
50 



Thurlow Weed's Discovery- 
paper. It printed in full the leading speeches 
of the day, made a feature of the campaign 
news of the different States, gave, with every 
number, the words and music of a campaign 
song (Weed thought the music unnecessary), 
and used illustrations occasionally. The 
Democrats opened the campaign with a vol- 
ley of attacks on General Harrison, belittling 
his military and civil capacity, and raking up 
for use against him every public expression 
of his that would serve their purpose. The 
Log Cabin defended its candidate vigorous- 
ly, under such headings as "Another Slander 
Nailed," "The Devices of Baseness," and 
urged non-partizan voters to support Harri- 
son because he was the representative of 
Madison's view "that a President who should 
remove officers for political opinions alone 
would be justly liable to impeachment." The 
Log Cabin announced that it would not print 
articles "assailing the private character of 
Mr. Van Buren, or any of his supporters," 
but in doing so it gave this keen thrust: "We 
do not think it at all material to the present 
contest to prove Mr. Van Buren a slippery 
lawyer, dishonest as a man, or incorrect in 
private life. We have no warfare with him 
as an individual." As election day ap- 
proached, the paper's efforts in behalf of its 
51 



Horace Greeley 



ticket became more and more earnest, and it 
closed the campaign with an appeal to "Free- 
men! " "Americans! " in which it said: "The 
hour of deliverance has come. . . . Press on 
to the polls. Speak to your friends and your 
neighbors. Implore the doubtful and hesi- 
tating to give one vote now for their country, 
and as many as they please hereafter for 
their party." Harrison received 234 of the 
294 electoral votes, and no one will dispute 
Greeley's modest remark, "I judge that there 
were not many who had done more effective 
work in the canvass than I." 

The Log Cabin was a remarkable success 
in one respect from the start. An edition of 
30,000 of the first number was exhausted be- 
fore the close of the week, and 10,000 more 
did not satisfy the demand. Later editions 
of 80,000 were printed, that being the limit, 
not of the demand, but of the editor's press- 
room facilities. Greeley had, when the pub- 
lication of the Log Cabin was begun, taken 
one of his many partners in the firm of Hor- 
ace Greeley & Co., which published the New 
Yorker, but the new partner was so alarmed 
by the rush of subscribers, in connection with 
the low subscription price, that he soon re- 
tired. An extra number of the Log Cabin 
was issued on November 9, giving the elec- 

52 



Thurlow Weed's Discovery 

tion returns, and a prospectus was published 
announcing that, yielding to urgent requests, 
the editor would soon begin a new series of 
the paper, the subscription price of which 
would be $1.50 per annum. The first number 
of this new series was dated December 5, 
1840, and the last number November 20, 1841, 
when it was succeeded by the Weekly Tribune. 
With good business management, a paper 
with the circulation of the Log Cabin should 
have made money for its proprietors. Even 
in those days advertising might have been 
secured.^ The experience in trusting sub- 
scribers of the New Yorker had not been a 
sufficient warning, and again credit was 
given, to be followed by another appeal to 
"friends who owe us," saying, "We implore 
you to do us justice, and enable us to do the 
same." Greeley was never a good business 
man, and it would have required a man of 
extraordinary business, as well as literary, 
ability to do the work he did in New York 
city and Albany from 1838 to 1841, with two 
journals almost constantly on his hands, and 
taking an active part in committee work, ma- 

* The Log Cabin in most of its numbers published less than 
a column of advertisements, increasing them to three and a 
half columns for a short time in November. The Herald in 
1840 printed from ten to fifteen columns a day, 

53 



Horace Greeley 



king speeches, and receiving the hundreds of 
people who came to him with suggestions or 
for advice. In illustration of his business 
methods Parton relates that, one spring day, 
after getting the mail from the post-office, 
Greeley put it into his overcoat pocket, forgot 
all about it, and left his coat hanging on the 
peg until autumn, when he had occasion to 
use it again. Then he discovered the letters 
containing enclosures about which the wri- 
ters had been for months inquiring in vain. 
His partners who, he says, "were no help to 
me," withdrew, one after another. But the 
Log Cabin did afford some pecuniary aid, and 
he wrote to Weed in January, 1841, that he 
was beginning "to feel quite snug and com- 
fortable," and by the spring of that year he 
considered himself in a position to start the 
Tribune. But the New Yorker was a weight 
on his hands to the last. He gave its editorial 
conduct more largely to assistants in its last 
years, and tried hard to sell it, and its end 
came when it was superseded in September, 
1841, by the weekly issue of the Tribune. 
He was then able to repay what was owing 
to subscribers who had paid in advance, al- 
though his books showed that $10,000 was 
due him from delinquents. These books, he 
says, he never opened again, and they were 
54 



Thurlow Weed's Discovery 

"dissolved in smoke and flame" when his 
office was burned in 1845. 

Greeley names four causes of the New 
Yorker's financial failure : That it was never 
properly advertised, that "it was never really 
published," the credit system with subscri- 
bers, and the lack of such facilities for dis- 
tribution as railroads and news-companies 
afford to-day. Certainly it was "never really 
published," and the want of good business 
management made its financial success im- 
possible. 



i)o 



CHAPTEE IV 

THE FOUNDING OF THE NEW YOKK TRIBUNE 

"I CHERISH the hope that the stone which 
covers my ashes may bear to future eyes the 
still intelligent inscription, ' Founder of the 
New York Tribune.' " 

So wrote Greeley in his chapter on the 
Tribune in his Busy Life. In truth, the 
Tribune was his lasting monument. He had 
qualified himself to edit it. He had the cour- 
age to found it. He made it a greater power 
than has ever been exercised by another 
newspaper in the United States. He identi- 
fied his own name with it as no other editor 
has been personally identified with the jour- 
nal committed to his charge. 

Greeley had entered on his thirty-first 
year when the first number of the Tribune 
was issued, and had been a resident of New 
York city less than ten years. In these years 
he had fought a desperate fight with poverty, 
almost unaided. But he had secured a recog- 
nition not only in the city and State, but in 
a wider circle. His editorial writing in the 

56 



Founding of New York Tribune 

New Yorker had attracted the attention of 
so competent a critic as Thurlow Weed. His 
residence at Albany had widened his ac- 
quaintance with the lawmakers gathered 
from all parts of the State, and with the 
State officials and the managers of both par- 
ties. There was probably not another man 
in this country who was then editing two 
newspapers, and the editor of one news- 
paper was a person to be pointed out in those 
days. The big circulation of the Log Cabin 
had still further increased his reputation, and 
in 1841 he received an urgent invitation to 
assume the editorship of the Madisonian, a 
weekly which it was proposed to publish in 
Washington, D. C, as an Administration 
daily, and to which he afterward contributed. 
He was therefore justified in his belief that 
(if he referred to editorial experience) he 
"was in a better position to undertake the 
establishment of a daily newspaper than the 
great mass of those who try it and fail." As 
to his finances, he had a capital of about 
$2,000, half of it in printing material. A 
daily newspaper in New York required much 
less capital in those days than now, but a 
man of more careful business instincts would 
have hesitated to embark in the enterprise 
with so restricted resources. 
57 



Horace Greeley 



Greeley had a very clear idea of the kind 
of daily paper that he wanted to edit. In a 
letter to Weed in January, 1841, he said: "As 
for the country press, two-thirds of it is a 
nuisance and a positive curse — a mere mouth- 
piece for demagogues who are ravenous for 
spoils. . . . What good have such papers as 
[naming some] and many more of that 
stamp, done us! ... I do believe they are 
all a positive failure — that any paper in bad 
or injudicious hands is so." His purpose in 
publishing the Tribune is thus set forth in 
his Busy Life: "My leading idea was the es- 
tablishment of a journal removed alike from 
servile partizanship on the one hand, and 
from gagging, mincing neutrality on the 
other." 

The rivalry that he had to face may be 
understood from the following list of news- 
papers published in New York city in No- 
vember, 1842, with their estimated circula- 
tion, as given in Hudson's Journalism in the 
United States: 



Cash Papers 

Herald, 2 cents 15,000 

Sun, 1 cent 20,000 

Aurora, 2 cents 5,000 

Morning Post, 2 cents. 3,000 

Plebeian, 2 cents 2,000 



Chronicle, 1 cent 5.000 

Tribune, 2 cents 9,500 

Union, 2 cents 1,000 

Tattler, 1 cent 2,000 

62,500 



58 



Founding of New York Tribune 



Sunday Papers 

Atlas 3,500 

Times 1,500 

Mercury 3,000 

News 500 

Sunday Herald 9,000 



17,500 

Wall Street Papers 

Courier and Enquirer. . 7,000 

Journal of Commerce . 7,500 

Express 6,000 

American] 1,800 



Commercial Advertiser 5,000 

Evening Post 2,500 

Standard 400 



30,200 



Saturday Papers 

Brother Jonathan 5,000 

New World 8,000 

Spirit of the Times 1,500 

Whip 4,000 

Flash 1,500 

Rake 1,000 

21,000 



The Courier and Enquirer, Commercial 
Advertiser, American, and Express favored 
the Whig cause, but their price, as was that 
of the Evening Post and Journal of Com- 
merce, of the opposition, was $10 per annum, 
and they were commercial rather than polit- 
ical and general newspapers, as Hudson's 
classification shows. The Herald, then six 
years old, and the Sun, eight years old, while 
independent in name, were anti-Whig in sen- 
timent, and not in good moral repute, and 
Greeley found encouragement in the advice 
of Whigs who thought the field for a cheap 
Whig daily a good one. 

Having decided on his venture, he ob- 
tained a loan of $1,000 from his friend James 
Coggeshall, to add to his own little capital, 
59 



Horace Greeley 



and promises of more, which he did not get. 
Then he printed in the Log Cabin of April 
3, 1841, an announcement that on April 10 
he would publish the first number "of a new 
morning journal of politics, literature, and 
general intelligence," adding: "The Tribune, 
as its name imports, will labor to advance 
the interests of the people, and to promote 
their moral, social, and political well-being. 
The immoral and degrading police reports, 
advertisements, and other matter which 
have been allowed to disgrace the columns 
of our leading penny papers, will be care- 
fully excluded from this, and no exertion 
spared to render it worthy of the hearty 
approval of the virtuous and refined, 
and a welcome visitant at the family fire- 
side." 

Greeley's hopes for the success of his 
journal rested largely on expectations of fu- 
ture Whig ascendency, raised by the election 
of General Harrison to the presidency. How 
nearly the death of the President, which oc- 
curred on April 4, came to checking the Trib- 
une enterprise Greeley explained in a brief 
autobiography, dated April 14, 1845, which 
was published after his death: "In 1841 I 
issued the first number of the Daily Tribune, 
which I should not have done had I not is- 

60 



Founding of New York Tribune 

sued a prospectus before General Harrison's 
death." 

The birthday of the Tribune fell on the 
date of the funeral parade held in New York 
city as a mark of mourning for the President- 
It was a day of sleet and snow, and every 
Whig heart was bowed down. Friends of the 
editor had secured for him less than five hun- 
dred subscribers in advance, but an edition 
of five thousand was printed, and of these, 
Greeley says, "I nearly succeeded in giving 
away all of them that would not sell." The 
first week's receipts were only $92, with which 
to meet an outgo of $525 ; but by the close of 
that week the paper had two thousand paid 
subscriptions, and this number increased at 
the rate of five hundred a week until a total 
of five thousand was reached on May 22, and 
the growth continued. Writing to Weed in 
June of that year, Greeley said: "I am get- 
ting on as well as I know how with the 
Tribune, but not as well as I expected or 
wished," and he called the giving of the list 
of letters by the postmaster to Stone's paper, 
"the unkindest cut of all." In a note to E. 
W. Griswold, on July 10, he said: "I am poor 
as a church mouse and not half so saucy. I 
have had losses this week, and am perplexed 
and afflicted. But better luck must come. I 
61 



Horace Greeley 



am fishing for a partner." Certainly if ever 
an editor needed a good business partner 
Greeley did, and he was fortunate in finding 
one. 

Very soon after this note was written, 
Thomas McElrath surprised him with an 
offer to become his partner in the new enter- 
prise, and this Greeley gladly accepted, and 
the announcement of the new firm was made 
on July 31. McElrath contributed $2,000 in 
cash as an equivalent for a half-interest. 
Not until this arrangement was made did 
Greeley consider the paper "fairly on its 
feet." The new partner was a member of 
the firm of McElrath & Bangs, who kept a 
bookstore under the printing-office in which 
Greeley had set up the Testament, and his 
natural business tact and his experience sup- 
plied something in which the Tribune editor 
was always lacking. This partnership con- 
tinued for more than ten years. Greeley has 
called McElrath's business management 
"never brilliant nor specially energetic," but 
so " safe and judicious " that it lifted the re- 
sponsibility of the publication office from the 
editor's shoulders. The Weekly Tribune took 
the place of the New Yorker and the Log 
Cabin on September 20, and the new journal 
was then ready to address both city and rural 

62 



Founding of New York Tribune 

readers. The issue of a semiweekly edition 
was begun on May 17, 1845. 

The price of a single copy of the daily 
during the first year was one cent, which did 
not cover the cost of paper and printing, 
compelling the owners to look for their prof- 
its to the advertisements. Greeley asserted, 
in 1868, that "no journal sold for a cent could 
ever be much more than a dry summary of 
the most important, or the most interesting, 
occurrences of the day " — a view which many 
modern newspaper publishers would combat. 
The price was doubled with the beginning of 
the second volume, and increased to three 
cents in 1862, and to four cents in 1865. In 
1866 it was enlarged to its present size. 

The Tribune's rivals gave it unintended 
assistance at the start. The penny Sun, for 
instance, finding that the new journal was 
gaining some of its readers, tried to hire the 
Tribune's carriers to give up its distribution, 
and, failing in this, informed newsdealers 
that those who sold the Tribune could not 
handle the Sun. This action stirred up a 
"war " between the two papers, in which the 
public took a lively interest, and attention 
was thus called to a new venture which was 
confessedly so serious a competitor. 

Before he had begun the publication of 
63 



Horace Greeley 



the Tribune Greeley had hired as an editorial 
assistant on the New Yorker a young man 
who, while a college student in Vermont, had 
been a valued contributor to that journal. 
This was Henry J. Raymond, in later years 
the founder of the Tribune's chief local com- 
petitor, the Times, and an antagonist in 
views social and political. Greeley has said 
that Raymond showed more versatility and 
ability in journalism than any man of his age 
whom he ever met, and that he was the only 
one of his assistants with whom he had to 
remonstrate "for doing more work than any 
human brain and frame could be expected 
long to endure." ^ 

Under this management the Tribune in 
its first year forged steadily ahead, winning 
more and more of the public attention, if not 
always of the public approval. Greeley's 

• Young editors who grow discouraged under criticisms of 
their first work may find encouragement in contrasting this 
praise of Raymond's practised labor with the following descrip- 
tion by Greeley of his first attempts (given in a private letter) : 
" Raymond is a good fellow, but iitterly destitute of experi- 
ence. . . . He went to work as a novice would, shears in hand, 
and cut out the most infernal lot of newspaper trash ever seen. 
He got in type a column of Lord Chatham, which you pub- 
lished a month ago, three or four column articles of amazing 
antiquity and stupidity, and then gave out an original transla- 
tion of a notorious story — which I fear we have published once. 
Thus the New Yorker is doomed for this week." 

64 



Founding of New York Tribune 

own energy was tireless, his editorial contri- 
butions averaging three columns a day. 
There was no valuable news that he was 
afraid to print, nothing evil in his view that 
he was afraid to combat. The transcenden- 
talists of the Boston Dial, to which Emerson 
and Margaret Fuller contributed, had a hear- 
ing in his columns, and the doings of a Mil- 
lerite convention found publication. Greeley 
himself reported a celebrated trial at Utica, 
sending in from four to nine columns a day. 
He aroused a warm discussion by character- 
izing "the whole moral atmosphere of the 
theater " as "unwholesome," and refusing to 
urge his readers to attend dramatic perform- 
ances, "as we would be expected to if we were 
to solicit and profit by its advertising patron- 
age." ^ At the same time he offended the 
religious element by publishing advertise- 
ments of unorthodox books, and he accom- 

' Greeley always considered the stage inimical to many of 
his pet reforms. He remembered a song that he heard in a 
theater in derision of temperance, and a ridiculing of socialism 
by John Brougham, and he thought some of the impersonators 
of Irishmen " deserving of indictment as libelers of an unlucky 
race," In summing up his Dramatic Memories in his Busy 
Life, he said : " I judge that the wise man is he who goes but 
once to the theater, and keeps the impression then made on his 
mind fresh and clear to the close of his life " ; but he had faith 
in a future stage " which will exert a benign influence over the 
progress and destiny of our race." 

6 65 



Horace Greeley 

panied an advertisement of an offer of $50 
for the best tract on the impropriety of dan- 
cing by church members, with an offer of 
prizes of his own for the best tracts on such 
subjects as "The rightfulness and consistency 
of a Christian's spending $5,000 to $10,000 a 
year on appetites and enjoyments of himself 
and family, when there are a thousand fam- 
ilies within a mile of him who are compelled 
to live on less than $200 a year." 

To a modern reader who runs over the 
pages of the earlier volumes of the Tribune 
the small space allotted to local news will be 
noticeable. One reason for this was that the 
smaller city did not then supply the topics of 
general interest to be found in the daily do- 
ings of a Greater New York. Another was 
Greeley's refusal to cater to the sensational, 
as promised in his prospectus. What we call 
"yellow journalism" he called "the Satanic 
press." In one of his attacks on this press 
he said (February 17, 1849): "Sometimes it 
will cant in dainty terms of the naughty 
ferocity of a fist-fight while devoting half its 
columns to an enormous exaggeration of all 
the details of that fight, and tagging thereto 
everything that can serve to whet the vulgar 
appetite for such exhibitions." But if some 
big event — like a meeting in behalf of the 

66 



Founding of New York Tribune 

Erie Railroad or a political gathering — re- 
quired attention, the report of the Tribune 
of those days would do credit to any news- 
paper of our own. 

When Greeley attacked a contemporary 
for some cause that aroused his indignation, 
his language was apt to descend to vitupera- 
tion, and "villain," "old villain," "escaped 
State-prison bird," and "deliberate false- 
hood " were among his favorite terms. The 
following on the result of a libel suit against 
the Herald, is an illustration: "The ruffian 
has got his deserts. The low-mouthed, bla- 
tant, witless, brutal scoundrel is condemned 
— condemned, too, by the people. Let not his 
sewer-sheet roll its nastiness and filth over 
the *' codfish aristocracies,' as he has called 
them for fifteen years." ^ 

1 " I remember very well a conversation between Mr. Horace 
Greeley and my father, Mr, Park Benjamin, during a railway 
journey which they were then taking to fulfil one of their 
numerous lecture engagements. Mr. Greeley came into the 
ear where we were seated with his under lip sticking out, 
and evidently in a very disagreeable frame of mind. He 
seated himself, and having wrapped his legs in an old red 
blanket which he always carried with him, looked up and said : 
' Benjamin, that man Bennett would disgrace a pigsty. I have 
told him so often enough for him to become convinced of the 
fact, but it is like water on a duck's back.' Mr. Benjamin 
laughed, and replied : ' Greeley, you are the bigger fool of the 
two. Don't you see that those socdolagers of yours only serve 

67 



Horace Greeley 



During its first year the Tribune pub- 
lished a letter on the trial of the suit for libel 
brought by J. Fenimore Cooper against 
Thurlow Weed, in which the novelist secured 
a verdict of $400. The writer of this letter 
remarked : " The value of Mr. Cooper's char- 
acter, therefore, has been judicially ascer- 
tained. It is worth exactly $400." This led 
Cooper to sue Greeley for libel, and the trial 
took place in Saratoga, in December, 1842. 
Greeley argued his own case, and the jury 
gave the plaintiff a verdict for $200. As 
soon as this result was announced, Greeley 
took a sleigh for Troy, where he caught a 
boat, and early the next morning he was at 
his desk writing his own report of the trial. 
This report, which filled twelve columns of 
the Tribune of December 12, 1842, he finished 
by 11 P.M. — "the best single day's work I 
ever did." Cooper made this report the 
ground for another libel suit, but that suit 
never came to trial. 

A young newspaper can secure no adver- 

to advertise him ? The general public has no memory. If 
you want to make a man prominent in New York city abuse 
him. The public will forget in a few days all you said of him, 
and will merely remember his name.' To this Mr. Greeley 
replied, 'I think you are right, and I won't bother with the 
hog in the future.' " The Tribune from that time dropped Ben- 
nett. — (G. H. Benjamin, in New York Evening Post.) 

68 



Founding of New York Tribune 

tising more effective than that which comes 
from making itself talked about, and the 
Tribune was soon talked of more widely than 
any other American newspaper. Its editor's 
personal following is indicated by the fact 
that he was so overrun with callers that he 
had to post a notice limiting visitors to the 
hours between 8 and 9 a. m. and 5 and 6 p. m. 
One may wonder when this editor of a morn- 
ing daily, who got to his ofSce before 8 a.m., 
found time to sleep. "For weeks together," 
he wrote to a friend in November, 1841, "my 
hour of quitting work has varied from 12 to 
2.30 A. M. This is killing, especially to one 
whose hours have been regular and reason- 
able like mine." Subscriptions and adver- 
tisements kept on increasing, so that in its 
third year it was necessary to issue supple- 
mentary pages, to accommodate its adver- 
tisers. The issue of March 3, 1849, contains 
this notice: "For two months we have been 
obliged to leave out two to six columns of ad- 
vertisements a day to make room for reading 
matter." In a dispute over the question of 
circulation with the Herald, the Tribune thus 
stated its own circulation on August 1, 1849 : 
Daily, 13,330; weekly, 27,960; semi, 1,660; 
California edition, 1,920; European, 480. 
The circulation of the daily reached 45,000 
69 



Horace Greeley 



before the war, and during the exciting times 
of that conflict it mounted to 90,000, while 
the weekly edition had 217,000 subscribers in 
some of the years between 1860 and 1872. 
The profits in 1859 were $86,000. Of its earn- 
ings in its first twenty-four years the sum 
of $382,000 was invested in real estate, and 
an average of $50,000 a year was divided 
among the stockholders.^ 

' In 1850 Greeley gave an example of the consistency of his 
views on cooperation by making the Tribune a stock concern, 
on a valuation of $100,000, represented by 100 shares of stock, 
some 20 of which were sold to its editors, foremen, and assist- 
ants in the publication oifice. 



70 



CHAPTER V 

SOUKCES OF THE TEIBUNE's INFLUENCE — 
gkeeley's PEKSONALITY 

Conceding that the Tribune was the most 
influential newspaper in this country in Mr. 
Greeley's day, and that he, as almost syn- 
onymous with it, was the most influential 
editor, it is interesting to glance at some of 
the sources of this influence. 

It must be granted at once that not even 
an editor of so strong a personality as Gree- 
ley could have secured the great clientage 
that came to be recognized as his if he had 
not supplied to his readers a good news- 
paper. The Tribune was a good newspaper 
almost from the start. Greeley's versatility 
now had full play, and he could not only hold 
the attention of a vast audience when he ad- 
dressed the public in an editorial, but could 
do marvelous pieces of reporting, compose 
interesting correspondence — as witness his 
letters from Europe and about his trip 
across the continent — and act as chief critic 
71 



Horace Greeley 



over all the columns under his control. To 
him, therefore, belonged no mere honorary 
share of the repute of the Tribune as a news- 
paper. 

But while on Greeley's shoulders rested 
most of the praise or blame for what ap- 
peared in its columns, his associates, to the 
day of his death, took no unimportant part 
in the making of the paper. In his first chief 
assistant, Raymond, he secured one of the 
ablest journalists of the day — a man who 
recognized the value of news, who knew how 
to select capable subordinates, and how best 
to direct their efforts. Among other con- 
tributors and editorial assistants to whom 
the Tribune was indebted were Margaret 
Fuller, Bayard Taylor, George William Cur- 
tis, Edmund Quincy ("Byles "), William 
Henry Frye, Hildreth, the historian, and 
Charles T. Congdon. Charles A. Dana 
joined the staff in 1847, and remained with 
it, a larger part of the time as managing ed- 
itor, until 1862. George Ripley began wri- 
ting for it in 1861, and, outliving Greeley, 
gave to its literary columns for twenty years 
a reputation that was unrivaled. Sidney 
Howard Gay, who was so conscientious an 
abolitionist that he abandoned his plan of 
becoming a lawyer because he could not take 

72 



Sources of the Tribune's Influence 

the oath to sustain the Federal Constitution, 
but to whose breadth of view and journalistic 
skill credit has been given for keeping the 
Antislavery Standard, which he edited, from 
being either narrow, bigoted, or dull, was one 
of Greeley's associates for ten years, dating 
from 1858, a part of the time as managing 
editor. Along with these worked a host of 
others, not so well known, who kept their de- 
partments up to the highest mark. 

The scent for news was as keen in those 
days as it is now, and, while the difficulties 
of obtaining it were greater, no effort was 
neglected to accomplish the object in view. 
Eailroads were then in their infancy, with 
less than 3,000 miles in operation in this coun- 
try in 1840. The first steamers to Europe 
began running in 1838. The Morse telegraph 
was first operated between Baltimore and 
Washington in 1844, and the first telegraph 
office was opened in New York city, at No. 
16 Wall Street, in January, 1846. The means 
then employed to secure news quickly from a 
distance were what was called the special ex- 
press — relays of horses and riders, the latter 
sparing neither themselves nor their steeds 
in making the time required of them. The 
Tribune files contain some interesting ac- 
counts of the time made by its express riders. 
73 



Horace Greeley 



To obtain a Governor's message from Albany 
the Tribune contracted for three riders and 
ten relays of horses, and that the start from 
Albany should be made at noon, and New 
York city be reached not later than 10 p. m. 
The trip was finished at 9 p. m., a speed of a 
little less than eighteen miles an hour if the 
first rider did not start ahead of time — a 
point about which the Tribune in its boast- 
ing of the feat the next morning could not be 
certain. A rider charged with the duty of 
bringing in the returns of a Connecticut elec- 
tion left New Haven, in a sulky, at 9.35 p. m., 
on the arrival of the "express locomotive" 
from Hartford, reached Stamford in three 
hours; there encountered a snow-storm and 
darkness so intense that he ran into another 
conveyance near New Rochelle and broke a 
wheel; took the harness from his horse and 
pressed on on horseback, arriving at the office 
at five o'clock the next morning. The most 
energetic reporter of to-day could not exceed 
this rider in enterprise and persistency. 

The ocean steamers of those days were 
not "greyhounds," and so great was the com- 
petition for the earliest foreign news that en- 
terprising newspapers did not wait for the 
arrival of the mails by water at the nearest 
home port. On one occasion, when news of 

74 



Sources of the Tribune's Influence 

special importance was awaited, the Tribune 
engaged an express rider to meet the steamer 
(for Boston) at HaHfax, and convey the news 
package with all speed across Nova Scotia 
to the Bay of Fundy, where a fast steamboat 
was to meet him and carry him to Portland, 
Me., whence a special locomotive would take 
him to Boston, from which point his budget 
would be hastened on to New York by rail 
and on horseback. Modern enterprise can 
not hope to excel this scheme, and we can 
sympathize with the editor in its failure to 
save him from being "beaten." The rider 
made his way across Nova Scotia through 
drifts so deep that his sleigh was often up- 
set, and was hurried across the Bay of Fundy 
through ice in some places eighteen inches 
thick, making Boston in thirty-one hours 
from Halifax — several hours ahead of the 
ocean steamer. But from that point delays 
were encountered, and, although the last 
rider made the trip from New Haven in four 
hours and a half, a rival journal had had 
the news on the street for two hours before 
him. When Henry Clay delivered an im- 
portant speech on the Mexican War, in Lex- 
ington, Ky., on November 13, 1847, the Trib- 
une's report of it was carried to Cincinnati 
by horse express, and thence transmitted by 
75 



Horace Greeley 



wire, appearing in the edition of November 
15. During the Mexican War a pony express 
carried the news from New Orleans to Peters- 
burg, Va., the nearest telegraph station, in 
this way delivering the New Orleans papers 
of March 29 at the telegraph office on Feb- 
ruary 4. The exploits of these expresses 
were described by the press all over the coun- 
try, and all this gave the competing journals 
a big advertisement. 

I am inclined to think that what did as 
much as anything to widen Greeley's reputa- 
tion, and to advertise his journal in its early 
days, was his devotion to "isms." One of 
his laudators had insisted that he had only 
two of these, but that assumption did him an 
injustice. "No other public teacher," to quote 
his own words, "lives so wholly in the pres- 
ent as the editor ; and the noblest affirmations 
of unpopular truth — the most self-sacrificing 
defiance of a base and selfish public senti- 
ment that regards only the most sordid ends, 
and values every utterance solely as it tends 
to preserve quiet and contentment, while the 
dollars fall jingling into the merchants' 
drawer, the land-jobbers' vault, and the 
miser's bag — can but be noted in their day, 
and with their day be forgotten." Herein we 
get Greeley's idea of "isms," a conception not 

76 



Sources of the Tribune's Influence 

unlike Carlyle's definition of a certain abbot's 
Catholicism— "something like the isms of all 
true men in all true centuries." 

The Tribune was started when, in the 
words of John Morley, "a great wave of hu- 
manity, of benevolence, of desire for im- 
provement—a great wave of social senti- 
ment, in short— poured itself among all who 
had the faculty of large and disinterested 
thinking " ; a day when Pusey and Thomas 
Arnold, Carlyle and Dickens, Cobden and 
O'Connell, were arousing new interest in old 
subjects; when the communistic experiments 
in Brazil and Owen's project at Hopedale in- 
spired expectation of social improvement; 
when Southey and Coleridge meditated a 
migration to the shores of America to assist 
in the foundation of an ideal society, and 
when philosophers on the continent of Eu- 
rope were believing that things dreamed of 
were at last to be realized. Greeley's mind 
was naturally receptive of new plans for re- 
form—a tendency inherited, perhaps, from 
his New England place of birth, "that land 
in which every ism of social or religious life 
has had its origin." The hard experience of 
his own family, as he shared it in his early 
boyhood, led him to think that something was 
wrong somewhere in man's struggle for ex- 

77 



Horace Greeley 

istence, and his observations among the city 
poor during the hard tiraes of 1837 enlisted 
his sympathies in behalf of all who live by 
labor. When, therefore, he found himself in 
control of a daily newspaper, he would not 
have been Horace Greeley if he had not been 
ready to make a "most self-sacrificing de- 
fiance " of pubhc opinion in behalf of doc- 
trines which he considered right. 

What seemed to his fellow Whig leaders, 
in the early years of the Tribune, vagaries — 
his advocacy of Fourierism, extreme temper- 
ence legislation, etc. — gave them much an- 
noyance, as likely to hurt the political cause 
with which Greeley's name and paper were 
associated, and they often labored with him 
on the subject. In minor points they met 
with some success, but when his mind was 
once made up, expediency was a futile argu- 
ment with which to approach him. In a let- 
ter to Weed, dated February, 1842, after de- 
scribing a sleepless night he had passed be- 
cause of some of Weed's criticisms, he made 
this declaration of personal independence: 

"You have pleased, on several occasions, 
to take me to task for differing from you, 
however reluctantly and temperately, as 
though such conditions were an evidence, not 
merely of weakness on my part, but of some 

78 



Sources of the Tribune's Influence 

black ingratitude or heartless treachery. . . . 
I have given, I have ever been ready to give 
you, any service within my power; but my 
understanding, my judgment, my conscien- 
tiousness of convictions, of duty and public 
good, these I can surrender to no man. You 
wrong yourself in asking them, and in taking 
me to task like a schoolboy for expressing 
my sentiments respectfully when they differ 
from yours. ... Do not ask me to forget 
that I, too, am a man; that I must breathe 
free air or be stifled." 

The New Yorker in its last year contained 
a series of articles on "What shall be done 
for the Laborer," in which it held to the prin- 
ciple that the "basis of all social and moral 
reform" lay "in a practical recognition of 
the Right of every human being to demand 
of the community an opportunity to labor 
and to receive a decent subsistence as the just 
reward of such labor." Greeley's sympa- 
thies were therefore ready to interest him 
in Albert Brisbane, a convert to Fourier's 
teaching, who had made the acquaintance of 
the French philosopher in France, and his 
friends, from his conversation, soon found 
that he had accepted Fourier's views. Bris- 
bane edited a magazine called The Future, 
which was printed in Greeley's office, and 
79 



Horace Greeley 



whose prospectus said: "The primary, posi- 
tive, and definite object of its labors will be 
to show that Human Happiness may be pro- 
moted, knowledge and virtue increased, vice, 
misery, waste, and want infinitely diminished, 
by a reorganization of society upon the prin- 
ciple of Association, or a combination of 
effort, instead of the present system of iso- 
lated households." ^ The Tribune of Novem- 
ber, 1841, contained an editorial which said: 
"We have written something, and shall yet 
write much more, in illustration and advo- 
cacy of the great Social revolution which our 
age is destined to commence, in rendering all 
useful Labor at once instructive and honor- 
able, and banishing Want and all consequent 
degradation from the globe. The germ of 
this revolution is developed in the writings 
of Charles Fourier." In the Tribune of 
March 1, 1842, was begun a series of articles 
by Brisbane on "Association," which were 
continued for many months. That the Trib- 
une and its editor might not be held respon- 

' Henry J. Raymond wrote to R. W. Griswold in 1841 : 
" Greeley got himself into a scrape by connecting himself wit h 
it (The Future), and the city — especially the Sunday — papers 
came down upon him with a vengeance. He's rather sorry 
that he enlisted, and is trying to take the curse off by adver- 
tising Brisbane's name as editor." 

80 



Sources of the Tribune's Influence 

sible for the views expressed, each of these 
articles (with a few exceptions) bore this 
caption: "This column has been purchased by 
the advocates of Association, in order to lay 
their principles before the public. Its au- 
thorship is entirely distinct from that of the 
Tribune." 

The Tribune had little to say on the sub- 
ject while it was publishing the Brisbane es- 
says, but on January 20, 1843, the Fourier 
Association of the City of New York was 
formed, and Greeley was the first-named di- 
rector of the North American Phalanx, or- 
ganized soon after, with a capital of $400,000, 
to put the Association idea into practise, and 
the Tribune of January 27, in that year, said : 
"We can not but believe that Association, 
with its concert of action, its unity of inter- 
ests, its vast economies, and its more effect- 
ive application of labor and other means of 
production will be extremely profitable, and 
offer to those who enter it not only a safe and 
lucrative investment of their capital and a 
most advantageous field for their industry 
and skill, but social and intellectual enjoy- 
ments, and every means of a superior educa- 
tion of their children." The "Brook Farm " 
experiment, which was later placed on a 
Fourier basis, was initiated in 1841, and the 
7 81 



Horace Greeley 



"Sylvania" enterprise, in Pike County, Penn- 
sylvania, in 1843. 

The plant of the North Amercian Pha- 
lanx was established near Red Bank, N. J. 
Only one-qnarter of the capital was paid in, 
but a big dwelling for the members and their 
families, called the Phalanstery, was erected, 
with a steam apparatus for cooking and 
washing, and mills, storehouses, and other 
buildings. All the members were divided into 
groups, each of which was assigned its out- 
door or indoor work. This experiment at- 
tracted a great deal of attention. Charles A. 
Dana and his family were for a time resi- 
dents of the Phalanstery, and Margaret Ful- 
ler, Frederica Bremmer, and Rev. W. H. 
Channing were among its visitors; but the 
Phalanx, like "Brook Farm" and "Sylva- 
nia," was not a permanent success. "Sylva- 
nia " passed into the hands of the mortgagee 
in two years, and, after a disastrous fire, 
"with some other setbacks," the property of 
the Phalanx was sold, its debts were paid, 
and the stockholders received a dividend 
equal to about 65 per cent of their invest- 
ment. 

The Tribune and its editor incurred a 
great deal of criticism, and the paper lost 
some readers, because of Greeley's espousal 

82 



m 



Sources of the Tribune's Influence 

of the socialist doctrines, but he refused to 
disassociate himself from the experiments 
while they were being tried, and the attacks 
on him helped to advertise him and his paper, 
and increased its circulation among those 
who could not regard as inherently wrong a 
cause supported, or countenanced, by men 
like George Ripley, Charles A. Dana, Na- 
thaniel Hawthorne, and Parke Godwin. In 
February, 1841, Greeley wrote to Weed that 
he took a wrong view of the political bearing 
of the Fourier matter, explaining: "Hitherto 
all the devotees of social reform of any kind 
have been regularly repelled from the Whig 
party, and attracted to its opposite. It 
strikes me that it is unwise to persist in this 
course, unless we are to be considered the 
enemies of improvement, and the bulwarks 
of an outgrown aristocracy in this country." 
In a letter to R. W. Griswold, Greeley said : 
"I do not regard either office or money as a 
supreme good; and, though I never had 
either, I have been so near to each as to see 
what they are worth, very nearly. I regard 
principle and self-respect as more important 
than either." When the Courier and En- 
quirer, in April, 1844, spoke of the Tribune 
as "the organ of Charles Fourier, Fanny 
Wright, and R. D. Owen, advocating from 

83 



Horace Greeley 



day to day the destruction of our existing 
social system, and substituting in its stead 
one based upon infidelity, and an unrestricted 
and indiscriminate intercourse of the sexes," 
the Tribune began its reply, "We do not copy 
the above with a view to defend ourselves 
from the cowardly falsehoods of the escaped 
State-prison bird," etc. As late as February 
10, 1848, replying to some criticisms in the 
Herald and the Observer, the Tribune said: 
"Should the Tribune get much further ahead 
of the Herald in circulation and business, we 
shall expect to hear that Fourier was a Fiji 
cannibal and the original contriver of Asiatic 
cholera." 

In 1846 the Courier and Enquirer accept- 
ed a challenge by the Tribune to a discussion 
of Fourierism, and its articles were written 
by Greeley's former assistant, Henry J. Ray- 
mond, who had joined its staff in 1843. Ray- 
mond denied that the condition of the labor- 
ing classes was as bad as the Fourierites 
pictured it, and called the new doctrines hos- 
tile to Christianity, to morality, and to con- 
jugal constancy. After the close of this de- 
bate the Tribune practically dropped the 
subject. Greeley's conviction, in the light of 
his later years, was that the social reformers 
were right on many points, and that Fourier 

84 



Sources of the Tribune's Influence 

was the most practical of them. He set forth 
in 1868, as part of his social creed, the fol- 
lowing affirmations: 

"I believe that there need be, and should 
be, no paupers who are not infantile, idiotic, 
or disabled; and that civilized society pays 
more for the support of able-bodied pauper- 
ism than the necessary cost of its extirpation. 

"I believe that they babble idly and libel 
Providence who talk of surplus labor, or the 
inadequacy of capital to supply employment 
to all who need it. 

"I believe that the efficiency of human 
effort is enormously, ruinously, diminished by 
what I term Social Anarchy. ... It is quite 
within the truth to estimate the annual prod- 
uct of our national industry at less than one- 
half of what it might be if better applied and 
directed. 

"The poor work at perpetual disadvan- 
tage in isolation, because of the inadequacy 
of their means. . . . Association would have 
these unite to purchase, inhabit, and cultivate 
a common domain — say, of 2,000 acres — 
whereby these advantages over the isolated 
system would be realized " (mentioning econ- 
omy, etc.). 

But, while holding to these beliefs, he ac- 
knowledged the difficulty of living up to them. 
85 



Horace Greeley 



His own experience had shown him that a 
prime obstacle to a successful social experi- 
ment was "the kind of persons who are nat- 
urally attracted to it, the conceited, the 
crotchety, the selfish, the headstrong, the pug- 
nacious, the unappreciated, the played-out, 
the idle, and the good-for-nothing generally; 
who, finding themselves utterly out of place 
and a discount in the world as it is, rashly 
conclude that they are exactly fitted for the 
world as it ought to be." He had found, too, 
that, where such experiments had been a 
success, they rested either on a communistic 
basis ( and he would not admit that a member 
contributing $100,000 to an industrial enter- 
prise should stand on the same footing as one 
who brings nothing, or that a skilled me- 
chanic should receive no more than a ditcher) 
or on a "firm and deep religious basis." In 
other words, the system as he took it up orig- 
inally was a failure, and a scheme as he would 
have limited it would have been rejected by 
modern socialists. 

Greeley was attracted by Sylvester Gra- 
ham's dietetic doctrine that there is better 
food for man than the flesh of animals ; that 
all stimulants, including tea and coffee, 
should be avoided ; that bread should be made 
of unbolted flour, and that spices should not 

86 



Sources of the Tribune's Influence 

be used, and only the least possible salt. 
After bearing Graham lecture, he became an 
inmate of his boarding-house, where the table 
conformed to the new views, and it was there 
that he met his future wife. Miss Mary Y. 
Cheney, a native of Connecticut, who was 
teaching in North Carolina, and who was 
even more susceptible to new doctrines than 
was her husband. Greeley used no alcoholic 
liquors, did not care for tea, and had given 
up coffee when he found his hand trembling 
after partaking of it at an evening entertain- 
ment. He preferred meat, in after years, to 
"hot bread, rancid butter, decayed fruit, and 
wilted vegetables," but always declared that, 
if we of this generation confined ourselves 
to a Graham diet, our grandchildren would 
live longer than we shall, and require less 
care from doctors. Mrs. Greeley lived up to 
her belief most conscientiously in their early 
married life, making no alteration in her 
table, and offering no excuse, when guests 
were present. "Usuallj^" Greeley tells us, "a 
day, or at most two, of beans and potatoes, 
boiled rice, puddings, bread and butter, with 
no condiments but salt, and never a pickle, 
was all they could abide; so, bidding her a 
kind adieu, each in turn departed to seek 
elsewhere a more congenial hospitality." 
87 



Horace Greeley 



Mrs. Greeley made the acquaintance of 
Margaret Fuller in Boston, and attended the 
conversations, for women only, planned by 
Miss Fuller, to discuss what woman was born 
to do, and how she could do it, and it was at 
Mrs. Greeley's invitation that Margaret be- 
came a member of the Greeley household 
when she went to New York. Until the latter 
part of the year 1844 the Greeleys had lived 
within less than half a mile of the Tribune 
office, one experiment in Broome Street con- 
vincing the editor that that location was too 
far from his work. After his exertions in the 
great Clay campaign of 1844 the family took 
an old wooden house, surrounded by eight 
acres of land, on the East River, at Turtle 
Bay, nearly opposite Blackwell's Island. 
Margaret Fuller described it as "two miles 
or more from the thickly settled part of New 
York, but omnibuses and cars give me con- 
stant access to the city." She did not com- 
plain of her accommodations there, but Gree- 
ley suggests that, in her physical condition, 
a better furnished room and a more liberal 
table would have added to her happiness. 

Greeley did not grant a ready acceptance 
to all of Miss Fuller's views. She wrote a 
great deal for the Tribune, however, on social 
questions, book reviews (including a very un- 

88 



Sources of the Tribune's Influence 

complimentary one of Longfellow's poems), 
and afterward letters from Europe, and 
Greeley has given generous praise to her con- 
tributions and her aims. But when she de- 
manded "the fullest recognition of social and 
political equality " for women, he was willing 
to concede the justness of this demand only 
on condition that the enfranchised woman 
"would emancipate herself from the thral- 
dom to etiquette, and the need of a mascu- 
line arm in crossing the street." Until this 
emancipation was secured he "could not see 
how the * woman's rights theory ' is ever to 
be anything more than a logically defen- 
sible abstraction " ; ^ and he declared his be- 
lief that "a good husband and two or three 
bouncing babies would have emancipated 
[Margaret] from a deal of cant and non- 
sense." Thus we see that there were "isms " 
to which Greeley could not be attracted. 

Greeley was responsible for an impres- 
sion, which gained wide currency at the time, 
that the Tribune editor was a believer in spir- 

' In printing a full report of the first women's convention, 
held in Ohio, the Tribune, on May 1, 1850, declared that a sin- 
cere Republican could give no adequate reason for refusing the 
suffrage to women if they should, as a body, demand it, because 
it was " a natural right, however unwise or unnatural the 
demand." This view was combated by Dr. Horace Bushnell 
in his Women's Suffrage. 

89 



Horace Greeley 

itualism, especially as demonstrated in the 
"rappings " of the Foxes, which attracted so 
much attention in 1848. The Tribune did, in 
December, 1849, publish as a matter of news 
an account of the "rappings," signed by re- 
sponsible citizens of Rochester, while Greeley 
Was in Washington as a member of Congress ; 
but in a long review of a book on the "rap- 
pings " the next month it said: "We have 
not meant to imply that any statement in 
this book is necessarily false or incredible, 
but only that they are of such a nature as 
to require a very large amount of unimpeach- 
able evidence to sustain them." Some two 
years later, Greeley was present at one of 
the Fox seances in a hotel in New York, 
but he was not impressed with their exhibi- 
tion. 

His wife, whose attention had been turned 
to things spiritual by the recent death of the 
son whom they so greatly mourned, attended 
several of the seances, and was so much inter- 
ested that she invited the Foxes to spend sev- 
eral weeks at her house, and exhibitions of 
"rappings " given there were widely talked 
of, and Greeley's name was naturally asso- 
ciated with the business. But this was not 
an "ism " that won his unconditional accept- 
ance, and he told a correspondent, through 
90 



Sources of the Tribune's Influence 

the Tribune, that "ghosts who had anything 
worth listening to would hardly stoop to so 
uninteresting a business as hammering." In 
his autobiography he pronounced the so- 
called spiritual communications "vague, un- 
real, shadowy, trivial," but added, of the 
"communications" made by "mediums": 
"That some of them are the result of juggle, 
collusion, or trick I am confident ; that others 
are not, I decidedly believe." 

A subject not to be classed as an "ism," 
in which Greeley always manifested the 
greatest interest, and which won for him the 
regard of a vast clientage, was farming. "I 
should have been a farmer," he wrote in 1868. 
"Were I now to begin my life over I would 
choose to earn my bread by cultivating the 
soil." The lack of intelligence displayed in 
New England agriculture was impressed 
upon him in his boyhood, and he never wrote 
more enthusiastically than in teaching farm- 
ers what he thought they ought to know. In 
the forties his editions began to publish re- 
ports of the sessions of the Farmers' Club 
in connection with the American Institute, 
and large space was always devoted in the 
Weekly Tribune to agricultural subjects. 

In no character was Greeley so satirized as 
in that of a farmer, professing to give instruc- 
91 



Horace Greeley 



tion on a subject about wbicli he had no prac- 
-tical knowledge, and his agricultural experi- 
ment at Chappaqua received a ^'ast amount 
of attention from pen and pencil. But such 
sneers were far astray. Greeley's ideas on 
farming were not quixotic; they were good, 
and they were founded on the advice of the 
best authorities of the day. The Chappaqua 
estate was ridiculed on the assumption that 
it did not "pay." Most of the "gentlemen 
farmers " of this country would have to con- 
fess to a similar failure of their experiments 
if judged by their account books. Chappa- 
qua, too, was not selected by Greeley, but by 
his wife, or rather to meet three conditions 
on which she insisted — viz., a spring of pure 
water, a cascade or brawling brook, and a 
tract of evergreen woods, and, to be acces- 
sible to the busy editor, the site must be near 
the city. The best he could do, in satisfying 
these conditions, was to accept with them "a 
rocky, wooded hillside, sloping to the north 
of west, with a bog at its foot." Much money 
was spent on this unpromising tract that 
might have been saved where so many ob- 
stacles were not to be overcome; but the 
owner overcame many of these, and by in- 
telligent methods. When he wrote his auto- 
biography he declared that he had been 

92 




c8 
O 



Ct5 



Sources of the Tribune's Influence 

"making " rather than "working " a farm, but 
he insisted that "good farming " would pay, 
and every intelligent observer of our day will 
testify that most farming failures are due 
to bad farming. 

In the early seventies the Tribune printed 
a series of articles on farming, by its editor, 
and they were afterward collected under the 
title "What I Know of Farming." A reading 
of these essays will give any competent judge 
a good opinion of the writer's practical 
knowledge of the subject. There is excellent 
counsel to young farmers about the selection 
and preparation of a farm; suggestions 
about draining which have since been accept- 
ed by thousands of agriculturists; sound 
views about waste in the use of fertilizers; 
pleas for birds as farmers' assistants, and 
sensible advice on such subjects as deep plow- 
ing, level culture for potatoes, and the neces- 
sity of keeping farm accounts. 

Merely to mention subjects under the gen- 
eral classification of reforms to which the 
Tribune gave support in its earlier years, we 
may recall its enthusiastic defense of the 
Irish cause in 1848, and of the cause of Hun- 
gary, in whose behalf it proposed the raising 
of a patriotic loan, in shares of $100; its 
championship of cooperation in labor; its 
93 



Horace Greeley 



gradual approach to the radical view of tem- 
perance legislation represented by the Maine 
law, and its opposition to capital punishment, 
to more liberal divorce laws, and to flogging 
in the navy. 

It is true that its espousal of many causes 
raised up a host of enemies for the Tribune, 
and no other newspaper in the United States 
was looked on as so dangerous by those who 
did not agree with it. Nevertheless, the cham- 
pion whose sword was naked for an attack on 
any worthy foe was an intellectual hero in 
thousands of eyes, and when Eaymond start- 
ed the Times in 1852 to supply a journal of 
political views similar to those advocated by 
the Tribune without the Tribune's "vaga- 
ries," the new enterprise succeeded, but it 
made no serious inroads on the circulation 
of the older one.^ Greeley came to be a sort 
of general counsel for many people, some 
of whom could undoubtedly be classified 
among that "fringe of the unreasonable and 
half-cracked, with whom," Higginson says, 
"it is the tendency of every reform to sur- 
round itself." Before the Tribune was a year 
old its editor told his readers, "We have a 
number of requests to blow up all sorts of 

* Greeley complained that the Times's circulation exceeded 
that of the Tribune in New York city. 

94 



Sources of the Tribune's Influence 

abuses," and he added, with that self-confi- 
dence which always characterized him, 
"which shall be attended to as fast as possi- 
ble." Greeley thoroughly enjoyed his reputa- 
tion as a philosopher and a seer, and a glance 
through his columns will show how little he 
was hindered by modesty in giving advice, 
those receiving his ministrations including 
young men seeking employment, young doc- 
tors and lawyers, country merchants, would- 
be editors, and inquiring farmers. 

Greeley's lectures also gave him and his 
paper a good deal of advertising. It is some- 
what difficult to realize to-day the importance 
of the lecture platform when "it was consid- 
ered a sort of duty for educated men to have 
on hand a lecture or two which they were 
willing to read to any audience which was 
willing to ask them." ^ Emerson wrote to a 
friend in 1843, "There is now a 'lyceum,' so 
called, in almost every town in New England, 
and if I would accept an invitation I might 
read a lecture every night." But all lecturers 
were not expected to contribute their wisdom 
or entertainment without compensation. It 
was said in the early fifties that "Ik Marvel," 
from the delivery of one not very good lec- 

* Hale's Lowell and his Friends. 

95 



Horace Greeley 



ture, could secure money enough to support 
himself while he was writing a really good 
book, and that one course of Bayard Taylor's 
lectures brought him profit enough to pay his 
way ten times around the world. 

Greeley always loved to talk, and the lec- 
ture-field was a tempting one to him. In later 
years it used to be said in the office that the 
only way he could be induced to take a vaca- 
tion was to start him off on a lecturing tour. 
His first attempt on the platform was made 
in New York in February, 1842,^ and he wrote 
soon after, asking his friend Griswold to get 
him an engagement in Philadelphia, saying, 
"I know there are hardly a hundred persons 
in Philadelphia who know of me," but sug- 
gesting that he could "fill a hole " in a pro- 
gram. Greeley was never an orator, but peo- 
ple have a curiosity to see a public man of 
wide reputation, and after the Tribune be- 
came established he "drew " on this account, 
although his subjects were abstract rather 
than, in the common acceptance, entertaining. 
Eleven such lectures, written between 1842 
and 1848, each of them in less than a day, 
were published in 1850 under the title Hints 
toward Reform, and the subjects included 

^ Letters of R. W. Griswold, p. 104. 

96 



Sources of the Tribune's Influence 

Human Life, The Emancipation of Labor, 
and The Formation of Character. In a lec- 
ture on Poets and Poetry, printed in his auto- 
biography, he commented freely on almost 
the entire list of English poets, pronouncing 
The Faery Queen "a bore, unreal, insupport- 
able," and confessing his hatred of the Tory- 
ism of Shakespeare; and in another lecture, 
on Literature as a Vocation, he styled the 
great dramatist "the highest type of literary 
hack," finding in his writings a combination 
of "starry flights and paltry jokes, celestial 
penetration and contemptible puns," and ex- 
pressing his unqualified admiration for Mrs. 
Hemans, in whose Adopted Child he had 
found "hours of pure and tranquil pleas- 
ure." 

Most of the audiences which listened to 
these discourses were lyceums, or young men's 
associations in country villages. The great 
place for lectures in New York city was the 
Tabernacle, which seated 3,000 persons. 
Greeley's audiences there numbered on an 
average 1,200 in the early fifties. In a course 
of lectures delivered in Chicago in 1853, when 
its population was about 30,000, Greeley 
stood second as a "drawing card," being only 
preceded by Bayard Taylor in a list which 
included John G. Saxe, R. W. Emerson, The- 
8 97 



Horace Greeley 

odore Parker, George William Curtis, Hor- 
ace Mann, and E. P. WMpple. 

In 1848 Greeley was elected to Congress, 
for the only time in his career, accepting a 
nomination in the upper district of New York 
city, to fill a vacancy caused by the unseating 
of a Democrat on charges of fraud at the polls, 
without the seating of his Whig opponent. 
As the term would last only from December 
to March, and the original candidate de- 
clined the nomination for the short term when 
the nomination for the full term was denied 
him, Greeley got the place. He attracted wide 
attention during his short residence in Wash- 
ington, and his paper received through him 
a vast amount of advertising, for a large part 
of which it had to thank his unwise enemies. 
If he was not the only editor who was a mem- 
ber of that Congress, he was certainly the 
only member who acted as editorial corre- 
spondent of so well known a newspaper as 
the Tribune. His fellow members would 
therefore naturally look on him as doubly 
armed — prepared to meet them face to face, 
and to criticize them with his pen; and his 
readers would regard his letters as of un- 
usual value, coming from one having the op- 
portunity for an inside view of things. 

Greeley went to Washington with a con- 
98 



Sources of the Tribune's Influence 

viction that the national legislators were as 
much in duty bound to attend strictly to their 
public business, and so to earn their pay, as 
was a man in private employment. Two days 
after he took his seat he scored the ab- 
sentees. In a letter to the Tribune, speaking 
of the "annual hypocrisy of electing a chap- 
lain," he said: "If either House had a chap- 
lain who dared preach to its members what 
they ought to hear — of their faithlessness, 
their neglected duty, their iniquitous waste of 
time by taking from the treasury money 
which they have not even attempted to earn — 
then there would be some sense in the chap- 
lain business." This he followed on Decem- 
ber 22 with an exposure of the mileage abuse 
which involved him in a bitter contest with 
his fellow- members, and gained him wide no- 
toriety. 

Members of Congress then received pay 
at the rate of eight dollars a day, and mile- 
age at the rate of forty cents a mile, by 
"the usual traveled route." "When Greeley 
made his first call on the sergeant-at-arms 
for his money, he was shown a schedule giv- 
ing the amount of mileage drawn by each 
member. Some of the figures appeared to 
him to be extravagant, and he at once de- 
cided on a step, conscientiously taken, but 

LofG. 99 



Horace Greeley 



which gave the best evidence of his news- 
paper tact. He hired a man to make for him 
a table showing the actual distance traveled 
by each member in reaching the capital, the 
distance for which he was allowed mileage, 
and what the saving would have been had the 
mileage been computed over the shortest 
route. As most members made out their 
schedules to cover as many miles as possible, 
without reference to the more modern steam- 
boat routes (and Greeley's amanuensis had 
taken the official mail route distances), his 
table, when the Tribune of December 22, con- 
taining it, came to Washington, excited a 
great sensation, every member being charged 
with receiving from $2 to more than $1,000 
in excess of his equitable allowance. "I had 
expected that it would kick up some dust," 
says Greeley in his autobiography, "but my 
expectations were outrun." "I have divided 
the House into two parties," he wrote to his 
friend Griswold at the time; "one that would 
like to see me extinguished, and the other 
that wouldn't be satisfied without a hand in 
doing it." 

For some days members simply discussed 
the matter with one another or with their 
critic. Him they could not bend. On De- 
cember 27 the subject was brought to the 
100 



Sources of the Tribune's Influence 

attention of the House by an Ohio member 
named Sawyer, who had been previously held 
up to ridicule by a Tribune correspondent 
for eating his luncheon during the session be- 
hind the Speaker's chair, and who, in the 
table, was credited with receiving $281 more 
than was his honest due. Mr. Turner, of Illi- 
nois, whose excess of mileage was nearly 
$200, moved the appointment of a committee 
to inquire whether the Tribune's charges did 
not amount to an allegation of fraud against 
the members, and to report whether they 
were false or true. Turner charged the ed- 
itor-member — whom he alluded to as "per- 
haps the gentleman, or rather the individual, 
perhaps the thing " — with seeking notoriety, 
and being engaged in a very small business. 
Greeley took part in the ensuing debate, hold- 
ing tenaciously to the main point of his dis- 
closure. 

The discussion continued until January 
16, when the committee made a report exon- 
erating the members, and there the mat- 
ter practically dropped. Greeley was ac- 
cused, during the discussion, of employing in 
his newspaper correspondence time that he 
should have devoted to the public business in 
the House, and a fierce and somewhat embar- 
rassing attack was made on him concerning 
101 



Horace Greeley 

a vote which he gave on an appropriation 
for the purchase of certain books — archives, 
debates, etc. — with which it was customary 
to supply members. He certainly got very 
much confused in his explanations. "For a 
time," he says in his autobiography, "it 
looked as though the mileage men had the 
upper hand of me, and I was told that a paper 
was drawn up for signatures to see how many 
would agree to stand by each other in voting 
my expulsion, but that the movement was 
crushed by a terse interrogatory remon- 
strance by Hon. John Wentworth, then a 
leading Democrat. ' Why, you blessed fools,* 
warmly inquired * long John,' ' do you want 
to make him President? ' " Wentworth's re- 
mark showed how strongly public feeling had 
shaped itself on Greeley's side of the main 
question. In one of the debates in the House 
a speaker declared that he had not seen a 
single newspaper that did not approve of 
Greeley's course. How restive the public are 
regarding attempts of members of Congress 
to increase unduly their own emoluments may 
be learned by recalling the excitement caused 
by the act of 1816 increasing the pay of mem- 
bers (including those then in office) from $6 
a day to $1,500 a year (Clay's vote for this 
bill nearly causing his defeat for reelection), 
102 



Sources of the Tribune's Influence 

and the outburst of denunciation of the Con- 
gress which, in 1873, passed the so-called 
"salary grab " bill. 

But the mileage abuse was not the only- 
one to which Greeley drew attention. The 
waste of time was a constant subject of com- 
ment in his editorial correspondence, and on 
January 22 he moved an amendment to the 
general appropriation bill providing that 
members should not be paid when absent 
from their seats except in case of sickness 
or when employed elsewhere in public busi- 
ness, and he made a vain attempt to save the 
bonus of $250 which it had been customary 
to vote to the House employees. The value 
of the attention which the seven-years'-old 
Tribune attracted all over the country be- 
cause of its editor's course in Congress could 
not well be overestimated, and an indication 
of the practical result is seen in the fact that 
its advertising receipts were larger by $7,830 
in 1849 than in the year previous. The econ- 
omist was received with great cordiality on 
the occasion of a trip to the West that he 
made in 1849, the marked warmth of his re- 
ception in Cincinnati calling out from him a 
special letter of thanks. 

Greeley's personality was always im- 
pressed on the Tribune. His favorite text 
103 



Horace Greeley 



was some article in another newspaper, and 
a count of his editorials would probably show 
that a majority of them began with a quota- 
tion from, or a reference to, some other ed- 
itor's views. His reply was very often em- 
phasized by the line, " Comments by the Trib- 
une," or the like, and if he desired to be par- 
ticularly emphatic he would sign his initials, 
"H. G." His correspondence, when he was 
out of the city in the earlier years, often oc- 
cupied the editorial columns, and he was for- 
tunate in getting before the public in his 
travels. Thus, when he first visited England, 
in 1851, he was chairman of one of the juries 
of award in the World's Exhibition in Lon- 
don, delivered the address proposing the 
health of the architect of the Crystal Palace 
at a notable banquet, and gave his experience 
as an editor to a Parliamentary Commission. 
When he visited Paris in 1855 he was ar- 
rested at the instance of a French exhib- 
itor at the Crystal Palace exhibition in New 
York, who tried to hold him responsible for 
a statue that was broken there because he 
was a director in the enterprise, and he 
was imprisoned for two days in the Clichy 
prison. His trip across the plains, in 1859, 
was made a notable event, and the driver 
of the stage in which he crossed the Sier- 
104 



Sources of the Tribune's Influence 

ras was a sort of hero for the rest of his 
life. 

Greeley "edited " the whole Tribune up to 
the day of his nomination for President. 
None of its columns escaped his supervision. 
He was not an easy man to please, as he con- 
sidered all mistakes likely to be placed on his 
own shoulders. The style of his own editorial 
articles was clear, forceful, and concise, with- 
out rhetorical adornment, and he expected his 
assistants to follow his model. Writing to 
one of these who had gotten out a number of 
the New Yorker in 1840, while he was in Al- 
bany, Greeley said: "The last New Yorker 
was a very fair number, bating typograph- 
ical errors, such as * Dugal ' for ' Dugald * 
Stuart, which is awful, as insinuating igno- 
rance against us. I saw ^ From whence ' in 
your verse, too. Don't you think that is 
shocking — positively shocking? " His letters 
to Charles A. Dana, written while he was 
watching the Banks speakership contest in 
1855-56,^ give many pictures of him in the 
role of the editorial supervisor. One of these 
letters began thus : 

"What would it cost to burn the Opera 
House? If the price is reasonable, have it 

» New York Sun, May 19, 1889. 
105 



Horace Greeley 



done and send me the bill. . . . All Congress 
is disappointed and grieved at not seeing 
Pierce and Gushing demolished in the Trib- 
une. . . . And now I see that you have crowd- 
ed out the little I did send to make room for 
Fry's eleven columns of arguments as to the 
feasibility of sustaining the opera in New 
York if they would only play his composi- 
tions. I don't believe three hundred who 
take the Tribune care one chew of tobacco 
for the matter ! " 

Again he wrote : 

"I shall have to quit here or die, unless you 
stop attacking people here without consulting 
me; " and again: "If you were to live fifty 
years and do nothing but good all the time, 
you could hardly atone for the mischief you 
have done by that article on Benton. ... I 
write once more to entreat that I may be al- 
lowed to conduct the Tribune with reference 
to the mile wide that stretches either way 
from Pennsylvania Avenue. It is but a small 
space, and you have all the world besides." 
Indicating his zeal for exactness, and his 
quick detection of an error, he wrote: "The 
Tribune of Monday says that the bank sus- 
pension took place in 1836. It was '37 (May 
10). Please correct in Weekly." 

Greeley was always easily approached, 
106 



Sources of the Tribune's Influence 

and the demands on his purse and influence 
were constant. He devoted a chapter of his 
autobiography to Beggars and Borrowers, 
but it gave no adequate idea of the money 
that such applicants obtained from him. He 
portrays many kinds of beggars — the "chron- 
ic," the " systematic," — and in summing up 
his experience says, "I can not remember a 
single instance in which the promise to repay 
was made good." But he went on lending. 
To a clerk from New Hampshire, who, arriv- 
ing in New York with his wife penniless, 
asked for a "loan " to take him back to his 
father's house, Greeley replied, "Stranger, I 
must help you get away. But why say any- 
thing about paying me? You know, and I 
know, you will never pay a cent." This makes 
us recall that "when the Spectator went out 
to meet Sir Eoger de Coverley he could hear 
him chiding a beggar asking alms for not 
finding some work, but at the same time hand- 
ing him sixpence." 

Some applicants, however, did meet with 
a refusal. Chauncey M. Depew has told of 
finding a visitor in Greeley's editorial room 
when he made a call on him. The editor's 
patience had evidently been almost exhaust- 
ed, and as he wrote on steadily he would give 
an occasional kick toward the caller, who 
107 



Horace Greeley 

every now and then put in a word. Finally, 
turning round, Greeley said: "Tell me what 
you want. Tell me quick, and in one sen- 
tence." The man said, "I want a subscrip- 
tion, Mr. Greeley, for a cause which will pre- 
vent a thousand of our fellow-beings from go- 
ing to hell." Greeley shouted, "I will not give 
you a cent. There don't half enough go there 
now." As Greeley was a Universalist, this 
reply was not so severe as it sounded. 

The first time I saw Greeley was in the 
little room, just off the publication oJBfice, 
where he did his work in his later years. 
Having occasion to ask him about the pub- 
lication of some article in the weekly edition, 
which was then in my charge, I found him 
busily writing, with a man, hat in hand, 
standing near him, evidently making some 
appeal. The desk was piled high with pa- 
pers, and there was a litter of the same 
around him on the floor. Over his desk dan- 
gled the handle of a bell-cord, with which he 
could summon his messenger-boy, and by an- 
other cord were suspended his scissors, which 
would have been lost as soon as he laid them 
down. To his visitor he apparently paid no 
attention, although the man would occasion- 
ally interject a few words, fumbling his hat 
nervously. At last, having reached the bot- 
108 



Sources of the Tribune's Influence 

torn of a page, Greeley swung around in his 
chair, and, in his querulous voice, said, "I'll 
\)Q (j_(i if I am going to spend my time get- 
ting New York offices for Jerseymen." Then 
the man went out. 



109 



CHAPTER VI 

THE TAEIFF QUESTION" 

Gkeeley's sympathies were always in 
favor of a protective tariff. He heard the 
hard times of his boyhood in New England 
attributed to the "cheapness " of English 
products; both the political parties in the 
presidential campaign of 1828, when he was 
an apprentice in the East Poultney office, pro- 
fessed devotion to protection, and speeches 
which he heard at a consultation of protec- 
tionists in the American Institute, which he 
attended while waiting for a job during his 
first year in New York city, strengthened his 
already formed convictions. But during the 
earlier years of his editorial work in New 
York and Albany the tariff was not a prom- 
inent issue. The compromise act passed in 
1833 continued in force until 1842, and, al- 
though it was not operating as Clay and other 
of his supporters anticipated (Clay looked 
for its speedy amendment), it was not made 
a "live issue." We find the existing tariff 
110 



The Tariff Question 

law named in the New Yorker as one of the 
causes of the hard times of 1836-37, the pos- 
sibilities of silk culture in New York State 
set forth, and the objections of the Evening 
Post to a proposed State bounty of fifty cents 
a pound on silk produced in the State warmly 
combated. 

The compromise act provided for a reduc- 
tion of all duties which exceeded 20 per cent 
under the act of 1832, on the following scale : 
10 per cent of the excess to be removed on 
January 1, 1834; 10 per cent more on Jan- 
uary 1, 1836 ; another 10 per cent on January 
1, 1838, and a fourth on January 1, 1840 ; on 
January 1, 1842, one-half of the remaining 
excess was to be abolished, and the remainder 
of the excess on July 1, 1842, leaving, after 
that date, a uniform tax of 20 per cent. One 
of the arguments used by Clay to secure sup- 
port for his compromise from his fellow pro- 
tectionists was that it would be superseded 
before its ultra reductions took effect. But 
during the second administration of Jackson 
and the administration of Van Buren — the 
latter had no very clear views about the tariff 
— other financial questions occupied the at- 
tention of the country, and even during the 
hard times of 1837 the tariff was only inci- 
dentally alluded to in the discussion of reme- 
111 



Horace Greeley 



dies; and until after the election of 1840 no 
aggressive steps were taken to change the 
law. But the approach of the date when the 
horizontal rate of 20 per cent would go into 
effect was causing uneasiness. The duty on 
rolled bar iron, for instance, which was 95 per 
cent (specific) in 1832, had dropped to 42.5 
on January 1, 1842, and would drop to 20 
per cent in the coming July. Moreover, the 
extra session of Congress which assembled 
in June, 1841, had to face a deficit of the 
revenues. 

As the Whigs were in control of both 
Houses they could make any change in the 
tariff on which they might agree, and to 
which the President would consent. Clay, 
their leader, quickly presented his program 
in the shape of a resolution setting forth the 
leading matters which should be acted upon, 
including, in order, the repeal of the Sub- 
treasury law, the incorporation of a United 
States Bank, and the raising of the necessary 
revenue both by an increase of duties and 
a loan. The extra session passed no tariff 
bill, but it did authorize a loan of $12,000,000, 
which, on account of the condition of the pub- 
lic credit, the Treasury found it difficult to 
secure. In his message at the opening of the 
regular session in the following December, 
112 



The Tariff Question 

President Tyler recommended tariff revision, 
with a view to the substitution of discrimina- 
ting for level rates, but without violating the 
spirit of the compromise of 1833. The Secre- 
tary of the Treasury, in his report, suggested 
that the condition of the finances would no 
longer permit a strict observance of that act. 
In the following March — just previous to his 
farewell to the Senate — Clay introduced reso- 
lutions favoring an increase to 30 per cent 
of the duties that would be reduced to 20 per 
cent in the following June, and at the same 
time a repeal of the law under which there 
was to be no distribution of the proceeds of 
land sales among the States so long as the 
tariff rate exceeded 20 per cent. 

The death of Harrison elevated to the 
presidency a man whom Greeley in later 
years characterized as " an imbittered, im- 
placable enemy of the party which had raised 
him from obscurity and neglect to the pin- 
nacle of power." The Tribune gave Tyler 
faithful support in the early part of his ad- 
ministration, even taking the view of only a 
minority of the Whigs in defending Web- 
ster's course in remaining in the Cabinet 
after his associates, at Clay's instigation, had 
resigned because of the President's veto of 
the United States Bank bill. But a visit to 
9 113 



Horace Greeley 



Washington in December, 1841, convinced 
Greeley that Tyler was "treacherously co- 
queting with Loco-f ocoism " with a view to 
his own renomination. Greeley made a trip 
in 1842 through parts of New England, New 
York State, and Pennsylvania, including 
"Washington in his itinerary, and on his re- 
turn he foreshadowed his view of the issue 
to be made prominent in the next presidential 
campaign in a note from "the senior editor," 
in which he said: "The cause of protection to 
home industry is much stronger throughout 
this and the adjoining States than even the 
great party which mainly upholds it; and 
nothing will so much tend to insure the elec- 
tion of Henry Clay next President as the veto 
of an efficient tariff bill by John Tyler. . . . 
If a distinct and unequivocal issue can be 
made upon the great leading questions at issue 
between the rival parties — on protection to 
home industry and internal improvements — 
the Whig ascendency will be triumphantly 
vindicated in the coming election." That year 
witnessed the struggle over the tariff be- 
tween President Tyler and the Whig Con- 
gress, the President vetoing two bills ^ be- 

* Of Tyler's veto, the Tribune said : " If the spirit of na- 
tional pride — the feeling of free sovereignty among the people 
— had not been stifled and destroyed by gradual and almost 

114 



The TarifF Question 

cause of provisions for the distribution 
among the States of the proceeds of land 
sales, and finally signing one which was de- 
cidedly protective, but which Calhoun de- 
clared was passed more to make a political 
issue than to please the manufacturers. 
This opinion was certainly in line with Gree- 
ley's recommendation. 

From that time to the date of his nomina- 
tion for President, Greeley, with the Tribune 
at his back, was the foremost advocate of a 
protective tariff in this country, addressing 
a larger constituency than any of the tariff 
advocates in Congress. He was early recog- 
nized as an authority on the subject, "Weed 
placing only Hezekiah Niles above him. He 
was the author of an article in the Merchants* 
Magazine of May, 1841, which replied to a 
free-trader's argument, and he and McElrath 
began, in 1842, the publication of a magazine 
called The American Laborer, whose purpose 
was the inculcation of the protective doctrine. 
In November, 1843, he and Joseph Blunt de- 
fended the affirmative side in a debate in the 
Tabernacle in New York city on the ques- 

imperceptible encroachments upon their rights during the last 
twelve years, a voice would go forth from the heart of the 
nation which would drive to Ms duty the weak man whose 
selfish ambition now turns him from it." 

115 



Horace Greeley 



tion, " Resolved, That a protective tariff is 
conducive to our national prosperity," Sam- 
uel J. Tilden and Parke Godwin taking tlie 
negative. As he printed liis argument on 
this occasion in his autobiography in 1868, 
it may be accepted as defining the ground- 
work of his belief. 

He laid down and explained five posi- 
tions : 

1. "A nation which would be prosperous 
must prosecute various branches of industry, 
and supply its vital wants mainly by the la- 
bor of its own hands." History proved that 
an agricultural and grain-exporting nation 
had always been a poor nation. 

2. " There is a natural tendency in a com- 
paratively new country to become and con- 
tinue an exporter of grain and other rude sta- 
ples, and an importer of manufactures." 
This was true because, in a new country, the 
available labor is in demand for clearing 
fields, opening roads, etc., while older coun- 
tries have not only an adequate labor supply, 
but capital and machinery. 

3. "It is injurious to the new country thus 
to continue dependent for its supplies of cloth- 
ing and manufactured fabrics on the old." 
The ruling price of grain in a district which 
exports it will be the price at the point to 

116 



The Tariff Question 

which it is exported, less the freight — that is, 
the price it brings there as obtained from the 
countries nearest at hand, and which can pro- 
duce it most cheaply. The British manufac- 
turer would only be obliged to mark the 
price of his cloths 5 per cent below the whole- 
sale price of the same grade in Illinois in or- 
der to control the cloth market in this coun- 
try. The free-trader who sees in this only 
more cloth for the money for the American 
purchaser, overlooks the point that the Amer- 
ican grain-producing purchaser must, under 
free trade, look abroad for a market for his 
surplus grain at the lowest world's price — 
"in other words, while Illinois is making a 
quarter of a million dollars by buying her 
cloth where she can buy cheapest, she is 
losing nearly two million dollars on the net 
product of her grain." 

4. "The equilibrium between agriculture, 
manufactures, and commerce, which we need, 
can only be maintained by means of pro- 
tective duties." It would not be wise to buy 
boots and hose and knives and forks in Eu- 
rope at a cost below the home price when the 
facility of paying for them manufactured at 
home would be greater. 

5. "Protection is necessary and proper to 
sustain as well as to create a beneficent ad- 

117 



Horace Greeley 

justment of our national industry." Under 
this heading he explained that "if manufac- 
tures were protected as a matter of special 
bounty or favor to the manufacturers, a sin- 
gle day were too long " to continue the pro- 
tection; protection should be afforded "for 
the sake of all protective labor." Why not do 
without protection when, under the tariff, you 
can manufacture cheaj^er than you can buy 
abroad? Because, under free trade, Europe 
can at any time dump on us its surplus prod- 
uct, and so ruin our own markets. He did 
not admit the existence of any foreign mar- 
kets for American goods, and said, "If the 
American manufacturers can not make sales, 
the sheriff will and must. . . . Were it cer- 
tain that the price of home products would 
be permanently higher than that of the for- 
eign, I should still insist on efficient protec- 
tion. ... I look not so much to the nominal 
price as to the facility of payment. And, 
where cheapness is only to be attained by a 
depression of the wages of labor to the neigh- 
borhood of the European standard, I prefer 
that it should be dispensed with." ^ 

' A series of 24 essays by Greeley, " designed to elucidate 
the science of political economy, while serving to explain and 
defend the policy of protection to home industry as a system 
of national cooperation for the elevation of labor," which had 

118 



The Tariff guestion 

Henry Clay received the Whig nomina- 
tion for President in 1844 without opposition, 
and Greeley threw himself into the campaign 
with all the devotion of one who loved the 
candidate "for his generous nature, his gal- 
lant bearing, his thrilling eloquence, and his 
lifelong devotion to what I [Greeley] deemed 
our country's unity, prosperity, and just re- 
nown." The Tribune early in the year had 
increased its size one-third and treated itself 
to a new "dress " (of type). As soon as the 
Clay ticket was in the field it issued a cam- 
paign weekly, called The Clay Tribune, fif- 
teen subscriptions to which (for the cam- 
paign) cost only five dollars. Greeley never, 
probably, worked as he did in that year. His 
wife was in Massachusetts, and he spent most 
of his time in the office, scarcely giving him- 
self opportunity to sleep. His contributions 
to the Tribune averaged three columns a day ; 
he made as many as six speeches in some 
weeks, and he conducted (without the aid of 
a secretary) a large correspondence. "Very 



appeared in the Tribune, were published in book form in 1870. 
In these essays he not only elaborated his view that protective 
duties do not necessarily increase prices to consumers, and met 
many arguments advanced by revenue reformers, but he dis- 
cussed paper money, usury, the balance of trade, slave and 
hired labor, cooperation, and kindred subjects. 

119 



Horace Greeley 



often," lie says in his Busy Life, "I crept to 
my lodging near the ofl&ce at 2 to 3 a. m. with 
my head so heated by fourteen to sixteen 
hours of incessant reading and writing that 
I could only win sleep by means of copious 
affusions from a shower-bath; and these, 
while they probably saved me from a dan- 
gerous fever, brought out such myriads of 
boils, that — though I did not heed them till 
after the battle was fought out and lost — I 
was covered by them for the six months en- 
suing, often fifty or sixty at once, so that I 
could contrive no position in which to rest, 
but passed night after night in an easy 
chair." It was in this campaign that Greeley 
won his position as the leading Whig ex- 
pounder and defender of the doctrine of pro- 
tection. 

Greeley accepted the election of Polk as a 
personal defeat of himself. "I was the worst 
beaten man on the continent," was his own 
later expression. But he also believed that 
Clay might have been elected had all the Ken- 
tuckian's supporters worked as hard as he 
did. The circulation of 100,000 copies of his 
Daily Tribune and of 25,000 of his Clay Trib- 
une would, he always thought, have secured 
Clay's election. 

Greeley did not ignore, in the next few 
120 



The Tariff Question 

years, the growing importance of the slavery 
question, as it was shaping itself in connec- 
tion with Texas annexation; but he did not 
abandon the tariff as his favorite leading is- 
sue for the campaign of 1848. Polk's letter 
to John K. Kane, in 1844, in which he had 
declared it "the duty of the Government to 
extend fair and just protection to all the 
great interests of the whole Union," had, to- 
gether with the placing of Dallas on the ticket 
with him, taken a good deal of the protection 
wind out of the Whig sails, so that Greeley 
did not consider the result a fair test of the 
popular opinion on the tariff. He was en- 
couraged, too, by the speedy passage of a new 
tariff bill by the Democratic Congress elected 
with Polk. The new Secretary of the Treas- 
ury, Robert J. Walker, of Mississippi, in his 
first report, strongly favored a lighter tariff, 
making what was considered an attack on the 
protection policy; and a bill which bore his 
name was passed (by the casting vote of 
Vice-President Dallas in the Senate, and 
against the vote of every Representative but 
one from Pennsylvania) which divided duti- 
able articles into classes, those in Schedule 
C, for instance, which included most prod- 
ucts over which there was a special contro- 
versy, to pay a duty of 30 per cent on their 
121 



Horace Greeley 

value; the tariff of 1842 provided that iron, 
in this schedule, should pay so many dollars 
per ton. In 1846, Pennsylvania, in an "off 
year," chose sixteen "Whigs out of her nine- 
teen Representatives in Congress, and the 
Whigs made encouraging gains in other im- 
portant States. Greeley strongly favored 
the nomination of Clay again in 1848, and 
another tariff campaign, but the convention 
named General Taylor. 



122 



CHAPTER VII 

geeeley's part in the antislavery contest 

In the tributes paid to Greeley's memory 
at the time of his death by fellow journalists 
in New York city, two, from the pens of men 
who had bitterly opposed him in many things, 
stand out prominent. "The colored race," 
said the World, "when it becomes sufficiently 
educated to appreciate his career, must al- 
ways recognize him as the chief author of 
their emancipation from slavery, and their 
equal citizenship ; " and the Evening Post 
conceded that, in the history of the American 
antislavery contest, "one of the most promi- 
nent places must be given to the sturdy, un- 
flinching, and persistent assaults of the Trib- 
une newspaper." His own estimate of the 
part he took in this contest was indicated in 
a speech at his reception in the Lincoln Club 
rooms in New York city, in June, 1871, when, 
referring to the Democratic "new departure " 
and the possibility of the Republicans going 
out of power, he said: "If it were my fate to 
123 



Horace Greeley 



go out at this moment, and every year of my 
life thereafter to be in the minority, prostrate 
and powerless, I should still thank God most 
humbly and heartily that he allowed me to 
live in an age, and to be a part of the genera- 
tion, that witnessed the downfall and extinc- 
tion of American slavery." To understand 
the value of Greeley's services in the anti- 
slavery contest it is necessary to examine the 
nature of that contest, the diverse views of 
the opponents of slavery, the public opinion 
in the North which had to be educated and 
directed, and the part taken in this work by 
the New York Tribune. 

The early opponents of slavery in the 
United States were of two classes — first, the 
Abolitionists, technically so-called, who re- 
garded slavery as a moral wrong so mon- 
strous that their consciences demanded its 
immediate extinction; and, second, those who 
condemned slavery, but recognized the rights 
of the slaveholders under the Federal Con- 
stitution, and confined their efforts to oppo- 
sition to the extension of slave territory, 
hoping for the gradual extinction of the insti- 
tution where it was established. Greeley be- 
longed to the second of these classes. 

In view of Greeley's inclination to asso- 
ciate himself actively with reforms, regard- 
124 



The Antislavery Contest 

less of hostile criticism or the effect of such 
association on his personal welfare, it seems 
somewhat curious that we do not find him en- 
rolled in the ranks of the early Abolitionists. 
He says that one of the incidents of his so- 
journ in East Poultney, Vt., which made a 
great impression on him, was the rescue of a 
slave who had fled there from New York 
State, and who, under the law of that State, 
was beholden to his master until he was twen- 
ty-eight years old. "Our people hated injus- 
tice and oppression," was the only explana- 
tion he thought it necessary to give of their 
action. The early Abolitionists, too, were in 
sympathy with him on many subjects. E. 
Kogers, in the Herald of Freedom, said: 
"Abolitionists are generally as crazy in re- 
gard to rum and tobacco as in regard to sla- 
very. Some of them refrain from eating flesh 
and drinking tea and coffee. . . . They do 
not embrace these newfangled notions as 
Abolitionists, but their one fanaticism leads 
to another, and they are getting to be mono- 
maniacs, as the Eev. Brother Purchard calls 
us, on every subject." 

But Greeley was naturally a politician, 
and his early editorial career educated him 
in the belief that, in a republic, political par- 
ties must be the means through which polit- 
125 



Horace Greeley 



ical reforms must be accomplibhed. His one 
political idol, Henry Clay, was a slaveholder, 
and his zeal in Clay's behalf, while the Ken- 
tuckian was a presidential possibility, as well 
as his devotion to a protective tariff, assisted 
in securing his acceptance of slavery as it 
existed, so long as the South was not actively 
striving to extend the slave power. 

Moreover, Greeley classed himself as a 
conservative, and some of his definitions of 
that term further explain his attitude toward 
the Abolitionists. Defining in his autobiog- 
raphy Clay's position as a slaveholder, he 
wrote: "He was a conservative in the true 
sense of that word — satisfied to hold by the 
present until he could see clearly how to ex- 
change it for the better." "Radicalism," he 
said in a lecture, "is the tornado, the earth- 
quake, which comes, acts, and is gone for a 
century. Conservatism is the granite, which 
may be chipped away here and there to build 
a new house or let a railroad pass, but which 
will substantially abide forever." The Abo- 
litionists, of whom Garrison was the leading 
exponent, were radicals of the most ultra 
type. Not only did they demand the imme- 
diate emancipation of all slaves, but they 
pronounced the compact between North and 
South which countenanced slavery, "a cove- 
126 



The Antislavery Contest 

nant with death and an agreement with hell," 
and refused to vote for any public officer un- 
der it, no matter how strongly the platform 
on which he stood opposed slavery ; and they 
declared, in the language of the Liberator, 
that "if the bodies and souls of millions of 
rational beings must be sacrificed as the price 
of the Union, better, far better, that a separa- 
tion took place." Of the constitution of the 
Non-resistance Society, whose tenet was that 
no man or government has the right to take 
the life of a man on any pretext, drawn by a 
committee of which he was chairman. Garri- 
son wrote: "It swept the whole surface of 
society, and upturned almost every existing 
institution on earth," one plank opposing the 
completion of the Bunker Hill monument. 
Many Abolitionists did not, it is true, follow 
the Garrisonians in their extreme views, and 
Giddings and Chase took part in the Free 
Soil convention of 1848 which nominated Van 
Buren for President; but it was the radicals 
who were the type in the public eye. 

Greeley was a boy ten years old when the 
Missouri compromise was adopted by Con- 
gress in 1821. Under that compromise the 
slavery question remained quiescent for 
many years. Slavery had not long been abol- 
ished in all the Northern States, and it ex- 
127 



Horace Greeley 



isted in the Southern States by permission of 
the Constitution, which specifically required 
that slaves escaping into another State 
should be delivered up. The few Abolition- 
ists who were then declaiming against this 
constitutional status were tolerated even in 
the North solely because of their insignifi- 
cance. "Had it been imagined," says Gree- 
ley, "that the permanence of slavery was en- 
dangered by their efforts, they would scarce- 
ly have escaped with their lives from any city 
or considerable village wherein they attempt- 
ed to hold forth." Greeley's own position, 
during the years of quiescence, he thus ex- 
plained in his autobiography: "Slavery, as a 
local institution, was primarily the business 
of the States which saw fit to uphold it. . . . 
Only when it sought to involve us in a com- 
mon effort, a common responsibility, with 
its upholders and champions, did it force us 
into an attitude of active, determined an- 
tagonism." 

While he could not withhold from the 
Abolitionists "a certain measure of sympa- 
thy for their great and good object," he failed 
to see how they were assisting to secure the 
end in view — how the conversion of all the 
people of Vermont to Abolitionism would 
overthrow slavery in Georgia. Hence, "con- 
128 



The Antislavery Contest 

servative by instinct, by tradition, and dis- 
inclined to reject or leave undone the prac- 
tical good within reach, while straining after 
the ideal good that was clearly unattainable, 
I clung fondly to the Whig party, and depre- 
cated the Abolition, or third, party in politics, 
as calculated fatally to weaken the only great 
national organization which was likely to op- 
pose an effective resistance to the persist- 
ent exactions and aggressions of the slave 
power." But before this was written, Gree- 
ley had witnessed the death of the Whig 
party, because it did not make its resistance 
effective, and had read, if not written, in the 
Tribune (November 24, 1847) : "As to the 
Abolition party, its movements and fulmina- 
tions have doubtless had the evil effect ob- 
served by Mr. Clay, of irritating and alarm- 
ing the masters generally, and rendering 
most of them impervious to the arguments 
for emancipation. But, on the other hand, 
their efforts have served to awaken and fix 
public attention, and, though their immediate 
influence has been unfavorable, we are not 
sure that the existence of slavery has been 
protracted by their labors as a whole." 

The vastness of the task required of those 
who were to educate public opinion in the 
Northern States to accept slavery as a moral 
10 129 



Horace Greeley 



wrong, and thus to array itself against sla- 
very extension, can be understood by an ex- 
amination of the popular opinion on the sub- 
ject in the years following the Missouri com- 
promise. For many of these years the 
opposition, not only to antislavery agitation, 
but to negro education and any approach to 
negro equality, was quite as strong in the 
Northern States as it was below Mason and 
Dixon's line. The Liberator, in its saluta- 
tory, said that "a greater revolution was to 
be effected in the Free States — and particu- 
larly in New England — than at the South. 
I [Garrison] found contempt more bitter, op- 
position more active, detraction more relent- 
less, prejudice more stubborn and apathy 
more frozen than among slaveholders them- 
selves." 

The list of antislavery societies in the 
United States in 1826 shows that there were 
none in Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, 
Massachusetts, or Connecticut, and only one 
each in Rhode Island and New York, while 
there were forty-one in North Carolina, 
twenty-three in Tennessee, four in Maryland, 
and two in Virginia. Edward Everett Hale 
recollects when black boys were not, except 
on one day, allowed by the bigger white boys 
to have the freedom of Boston Common ; and 
130 



The Antislavery Contest 

when he was graduated from Harvard Col- 
lege in 1839, William Francis Clianning was 
the only one of his classmates who would 
have allowed himself to be called an Aboli- 
tionist. When, in October, 1835, the Female 
Antislavery Society of Boston proposed to 
hold a public meeting, at which an address 
would be made by George Thompson, an elo- 
quent assailant of slavery, handbills were 
circulated announcing that a purse of $100 
had been raised by patriotic citizens "to re- 
ward the individual who shall first lay vio- 
lent hands on Thompson so that he may 
be brought to the tar-kettle before dark. 
Friends of the Union, be vigilant ! " and the 
meeting was broken up by a mob which the 
mayor confessed himself unable to control. 
A meeting of Abolitionists in Philadelphia, 
on July 4, 1834, was made the occasion of 
mob violence, in which Lewis Tappen's house 
was gutted, and other buildings, including 
churches, were damaged, and unoffending 
negroes were assaulted in the streets; these 
disorders continued for several days, and ex- 
tended into New Jersey. 

The public animosity shown to the Abo- 
litionists in the North was quite as deter- 
mined against any attempt to better the con- 
dition of negroes. The "Jim Crow " cars of 
131 



Horace Greeley 



the Southern States to-day were common on 
Massachusetts railroads in 1840, and Higgin- 
son remembers when a colored woman was 
put out of an omnibus near Cambridge Com- 
mon. When, in 1831, it was proposed by the 
free people of color to establish a school on 
the manual labor plan, and New Haven, 
Conn., was selected as its site, a meeting of 
citizens there resolved to resist it by every 
lawful means. Because of the admission of 
colored students to Noyes's Academy, at Ca- 
naan, N. H., in 1835, three hundred men and 
one hundred yokes of oxen moved the build- 
ing from its foundation. When Miss Cran- 
dall, a Quakeress, advertised in 1832 that col- 
ored pupils would be admitted to her school 
in Canterbury, Conn., a town meeting was 
called to abate "the nuisance," and the town 
authorities induced the Legislature to pass 
an act forbidding any school in the State for 
the education of colored persons not resi- 
dents of the State, without the consent of the 
selectmen. When Miss Crandall persisted in 
teaching her colored pupils, she was arrested 
and confined overnight in a cell whose last 
occupant had been a murderer. Failiug to 
secure her conviction, her neighbors, in 1834, 
first tried to burn her house, and later so 
nearly demolished it with stones and clubs 
132 



The Antislavery Contest 

tliat it was left uninhabitable. It was twenty 
years later than this that Boston witnessed 
the scenes which accompanied the surrender 
of Anthony Burns. In 1835 the notes of a 
clergyman who tried to preach against sla- 
very in Worcester, Mass., were torn up; an 
academy in Concord, N. H., was demolished 
because colored pupils were admitted; a 
clergyman was arrested in the same State 
while delivering an antislavery lecture, and 
sentenced to three months' imprisonment as 
a disorderly person; and in 1834 an antisla- 
very celebration in the Chatham Street chapel 
in New York city was broken up, and three 
days' rioting followed. 

The most potent agent that could have 
been enlisted in the work of changing this 
public opinion, and building up a bulwark 
against slavery extension, was a newspaper 
that was not affiliated with the radicals, that 
ivas the leading mouthpiece (Greeley said it 
was not the organ) of one of the controlling 
political parties of the day, that was edited 
by a man who possessed in a large degree 
the confidence of his readers, and that had a 
circulation which gave his words a wide hear- 
ing. This matter of circulation is an impor- 
tant one in gaging the Tribune's part in the 
overthrow of slavery. The Abolition jour- 
133 



Horace Greeley 



nals, aside from the fact that they addressed, 
for the most part, readers who were already 
convinced, addressed few of these. Garri- 
son's Liberator had only between 150 and 
2,500 subscribers during its entire career, 
and the National Antislavery Standard, whose 
paying circulation in 1846 was 1,400, was kept 
alive by annual bazaars. The Tribune's cir- 
culation grew with the intensity of its anti- 
slavery views, and in January, 1854, it had a 
circulation of 96,000 for its weekly, and of 
130,000 for its total issues. How Horace 
Greeley led on his readers, step by step, to 
face the great issue, we may now learn from 
the words he addressed to them. 

When conducting the New Yorker, in 1834, 
Greeley, while believing slavery "to be at the 
bottom of most of the evils which affect the 
communities of the South," accepted and de- 
fended the right to be let alone, as regards 
this question, for which the South was con- 
tending. His paper said in July of that year : 
"The Union was formed with a perfect 
knowledge, on the one hand, that slavery ex- 
isted in the South, and, on the other, it was 
utterly disapproved and discountenanced at 
the North. But the framers of the Constitu- 
tion saw no reason for distrust and dissen- 
sion in this circumstance. Wisely avoiding 
134 



The Antislavery Contest 

all discussion of a subject so delicate and ex- 
citing, they proceeded to the formation of ' a 
more perfect union,' which, leaving each sec- 
tion in possession of its undoubted right of 
regulating its own internal government and 
enjoying its own speculative opinions, pro- 
vided only for the common benefit and mu- 
tual well-being of the whole. And why should 
not this arrangement be satisfactory and per- 
fect? Why should not even the existing evils 
of one section be left to the correction of its 
own wisdom and experience when pointed out 
by the unerring finger of experience? " 

The New Yorker supplies expressions of 
the editor's views of the agitation stirred up 
by the Abolitionists. On May 21, 1836, con- 
demning an attack on an antislavery conven- 
tion at Granville, Ohio, it expressed a hope 
that, on the next occasion of this kind, "the 
real and substantial opponents of the anti- 
slavery agitation " would repress the mob 
pretending to act in their behalf, and said: 
"It is quite enough to have some hundreds 
of Abolitionist declaimers exciting the public 
mind with regard to this subject, without 
obliging us to look with complaisance on such 
suicidal outrages committed in the name of 
the cause of moderation, right, reason, and 
the compromises of the Constitution." In 
135 



Horace Greeley 



May, 1838, referring to antiabolition riots in 
Philadelphia which resulted in the burning of 
Penn Hall, it said, "The Abolitionists, we 
doubt not, would like the fun of having their 
hall burned every year, and their chance to 
make ten or twenty thousand converts out of 
the outrage and excitement. Let no one sup- 
pose us inclined to treat such criminal out- 
rages with levity. Such humors of the body 
politic should be corrected by an application 
of grape and canister." 

Greeley says in his autobiography that 
the two events which "materially modified " 
his preconceptions of the slavery question 
were the attempts of the South to annex 
Texas, and the killing of Elijah P. Lovejoy 
at Alton, 111., in 1837, because he insisted on 
publishing there a religious newspaper which 
condemned slavery as one of the evils op- 
posed to godliness. The New Yorker of No- 
vember 25 in that year contained an editorial 
two columns long giving an account of the 
murder, and saying : 

"We dare not trust ourselves to speak of 
this shocking affair in the language which 
our indignation would dictate. It forms one 
of the foulest blots on the page of American 
history. . . . We loathe and abhor the miser- 
able cant of those who talk of Mr. Lovejoy as 
136 



The Antislavery Contest 

guilty of * resisting public opinion.' Public 
opinion, forsooth ! What right have five hun- 
dred or five thousand to interfere with the 
lawful expression of a freeman's sentiments 
because they happen to number more than 
those who think with him! We spurn the 
base tyranny — this utter denial of all rights 
save as the tender mercies of a mob shall 
vouchsafe them. . . . Love joy's errors, or 
those of Abolitionists generally, have nothing 
to do in any shape with the turpitude of this 
outrage." 

This protest was uttered when the Boston 
authorities were refusing the Rev. Dr. Chan- 
ning the use of Faneuil Hall in which to hold 
a meeting to condemn Love joy's murder, and 
when the Attorney-General of Massachusetts 
was declaring on the platform that Love joy 
died as the fool dieth, and that his murderers 
stood for what the men stood who threw the 
tea into Boston harbor! 

The Texas question played so important 
a part in the antislavery contest that a brief 
summary of the events involved is necessary 
to an understanding of Greeley's attitude. 
Americans who had received grants of land 
in Texas from Mexico adopted a constitution 
in 1833, and in 1836 declared their independ- 
ence. The massacre of the Alamo, avenged 
137 



Horace Greeley 



in the battle of San Jacinto, followed. The 
constitution of the independent State of Tex- 
as gave its sanction to the institution of sla- 
very, which was contrary to the law of Mexi- 
co, and the news of the victory at San Jacinto 
was received with joy in the Southern States, 
from which petitions were sent to Congress 
asking for the recognition of Texan inde- 
pendence. Webster held that our Govern- 
ment ought to recognize a de facto govern- 
ment in Texas, if one had been established, 
and Clay reported a resolution acknowledg- 
ing that obligation whenever our Government 
received satisfactory information that such 
a government was in operation, and his reso- 
lution was adopted by both Houses. Mean- 
while, claims against the Mexican Govern- 
ment, made by Americans, were piling up 
and were disregarded. In December, 1836, 
the United States charge d'affaires at the 
city of Mexico asked for his passports and 
departed, and in February, 1837, President 
Jackson, who had tried in vain to purchase 
Texas of Mexico, in a special message to 
Congress asked for power to make reprisals 
if the Mexican Government refused to meet 
its obligations. 

Webster made a speech in Niblo's Garden, 
New York city, on March 15, 1837, which, in 
138 



The Antislavery Contest 

Greeley's view, expressed "the more consider- 
ate Northern view of the [Texas annexation] 
subject " at that time. In that speech he 
said: 

"On the general question of slavery a 
great portion of the community is already 
strongly excited. The subject has not only 
attracted attention as a question of politics, 
but it has started a far deeper-toned chord. 
It has arrested the religious feeling of the 
country; it has taken strong hold oil the 
consciences of men. He is a rash man, in- 
deed, and little conversant with human na- 
ture, and especially has he a very erroneous 
estimate of the character of the people of this 
country, who supposes that a feeling of this 
kind is to be trifled with or despised. It will 
assuredly cause itself to be respected. It may 
be reasoned with ; it may be made willing — X 
believe it is entirely willing — to fulfil all ex- 
isting engagements and all existing duties, to 
uphold and defend the Constitution as it is 
established, with whatever regrets about 
some provisions which it does actually con- 
tain. But to coerce it into silence, to endeavor 
to restrain it from expression, to seek to com- 
press and confine it, warm as it is, and more 
heated as such endeavors would inevitably 
render it — should this be attempted, I know 
139 



Horace Greeley 



nothing, not even in the Constitution or in 
the Union itself, which would not be endan- 
gered by the explosion which might follow." 

President Van Buren in his message of 
December, 1837, informed Congress of his 
failure to adjust the American claims. The 
Texas Government had proposed annexation 
to our Government in August of that year, 
but Van Buren refused to entertain a propo- 
sition that was certain to involve us in a war 
with Mexico. This action of Texas aroused 
the country. The Legislatures of eight 
Northern States made formal protests 
against annexation, and Senator Preston, of 
South Carolina, offered a resolution favoring 
it, but no direct issue was reached. Van Bu- 
ren continued attempts to secure a settlement 
with Mexico, and in 1839, by means of a 
treaty, the matter was referred to the King 
of Prussia as arbitrator; but when the time 
at which the arrangement was to expire 
(1842) arrived, many claims remained unset- 
tled. It was charged then that these claims 
were allowed to remain unadjusted in order 
to keep the Texas question open. 

Tyler's elevation to the presidency, 

through the death of Harrison, gave the 

country an executive who was ready to make 

Texas annexation a part of his policy, no 

140 



The Antislavery Contest 

matter how the party that had elected him 
viewed the matter. Six months after his in- 
auguration he hinted to Webster the possi- 
bihty of securing Texas by treaty, and asked, 
^' Could the North be reconciled to it? Sla- 
very — I know that is the objection, and it 
would be well founded if it did not already 
exist among us." But when, in March, 1842, 
Texas made another offer of annexation, 
Webster strongly opposed it, and in May, 
1843, he left the Cabinet — too late to escape 
the criticisms of his warmest party friends. 
The new Secretary of State — Upshur, of Vir- 
ginia — was a strong annexationist, and the 
administration began at once secretly to take 
steps to carry out its policy. The elections 
of 1842 had given the Democrats a big major- 
ity in the House, but the Senate had to be 
reckoned with in securing the ratification of 
an annexation treaty. The administration 
made a direct proposal of such a treaty to 
Texas, and, after the Texas Government had 
received from the United States' diplomatic 
agent an assurance that no power would be 
permitted by the United States to invade 
Texas territory because of such a treaty, an 
envoy from Texas was sent to Washington to 
complete the negotiations. Before his arrival 
Upshur had been killed by the explosion on 
141 



Horace Greeley 

the frigate Princeton; in March, 1844, Cal- 
houn took his place; and on April 12 the 
treaty was signed and ten days later sent to 
the Senate, where, on June 8, it was defeated 
by a vote of sixteen yeas to thirty-five nays. 
Tyler at once, in a special message, urged 
the House to secure annexation by "some 
other form of proceeding," but Congress ad- 
journed without carrying out the scheme. 

The year 1844 was a presidential year, 
and the most probable candidates for the 
heads of the two tickets were Clay and Van 
Buren. Both of these leaders looked on the 
Texas question as a dangerous one, and two 
years earlier, when Van Buren visited Clay 
at Ashland, it was said that they had agreed 
to place themselves in opposition to annexa- 
tion. Clay found himself forced to define his 
position before the Whig convention met, and 
he did so in his "Raleigh letter " of April 17. 
In this he stated his belief that any title to 
Texas which our Government had received 
under the Louisiana purchase had been ceded 
to Spain by subsequent treaty; that the 
United States should not go to war with Mex- 
ico to secure Texas, and that he was not in 
favor of acquiring new territory simply to 
maintain a balance of power between the 
North and South. Van Buren also wrote a 
142 



The Antislavery Contest 

letter, in which he did not admit the constitu- 
tionality of acquiring Texas by treaty, and 
pointed out that annexation meant war with 
Mexico, but said that he was not to be "in- 
fluenced by local or sectional feelings " in 
dealing with such a question as slavery. 
Clay's nomination followed, but Van Buren 
was thrown over by the Democrats for Polk, 
although he had a majority on the first ballot, 
a resolution requiring a two-thirds vote to 
nominate having been carried. Some Aboli- 
tionists, under the name of the Liberty party, 
had in August, 1843, nominated James G. 
Birney as their candidate. 

Greeley was educated by the Texas con- 
troversy step by step. The New Yorker in 
October, 1836, opposed annexation as likely 
to cause a revival of the slavery controversy 
"so happily adjusted" by the Missouri com- 
promise. On February 18, 1837, announcing 
the vote of the House denying to slaves the 
right of petition, it expressed a hope that thus 
"the Abolition question, which has so consid- 
erably misimproved the time and temper of 
the House of Representatives, was put to 
rest, we trust, for the remainder of the ses- 
sion." On the twenty-third of December fol- 
lowing, it headed an account of the excite- 
ment in Congress over the presentation of 
143 



Horace Greeley 



petitions for the abolition of slavery in the 
District of Columbia, "By our latest advices 
from Washington we learn that the event 
which we have long anticipated — a disrup- 
tion of the ties which bind us together as 
a nation, through the influence of the Abo- 
lition question — seems on the brink of oc- 
currence." 

Before the Tribune was a year old its ed- 
itor's patience was tried by a decision of the 
United States Supreme Court (Prigg vs. 
Pennsylvania) that the right of a slaveholder 
to capture a fugitive slave anywhere was ab- 
solute, State laws to the contrary notwith- 
standing, and it said, "The effect of this deci- 
sion will be to deepen the impression on the 
public mind that the existence of slavery for 
some is inconsistent with, and fatal to, the 
preservation of perfect freedom for any." 

Greeley's greatest effort in behalf of a 
presidential candidate was made for Clay, 
whose name he had kept at the head of his 
editorial page throughout 1843, and for 
whose election he labored the next year as he 
never labored again. Clay's status as a slave- 
owner was the subject of attacks (which the 
Tribune called "a foul conspiracy") by the 
Democrats and the Liberty men, both before 
and after his nomination, and on January 16, 
144 



The Antislavery Contest 

1843, the Tribune stated its own view of the 
matter thus : 

"Let no one pervert our position. We do 
not say the citizens of the free States have no 
means, no power, no right to act adversely 
upon slavery. They have means and powers 
which existed antecedently to the Constitu- 
tion, and were not affected by it. The right 
to speak and write and labor, as men, against 
any moral wrong, is anterior (might we not 
say superior) to all government. . . . We 
can excuse the thoroughgoing Abolitionist 
who, declaring the Constitution an iniquitous 
compact, refuses to vote or exercise any fran- 
chise under it. But he who uses the power 
granted by the Constitution in violation of its 
essential conditions, is guilty of a deep and 
moral wrong. ... To abandon Clay on such 
[slavery] grounds would be a breach of faith 
to the Whigs, and treason to the Constitu- 
tion." 

After the nominations were made the 
Tribune defended Polk in the same way. 

Greeley's early objection to the annexa- 
tion of Texas was based on the view that it 
would be a glaring assumption of Federal 
power, rather than that it would furnish new 
territory to slavery; and after Clay's nomi- 
nation the Tribune (May 16, 1844) "depre- 
11 145 



Horace Greeley 



cated, for reasons of policy, any Northern 
commingling of the questions of annexation 
and slavery for the present." In other words, 
Greeley as well as Clay would have been glad 
to keep the slavery question out of the pend- 
ing campaign. But Tyler's Texas scheme so 
aroused the editor's indignation that no ques- 
tion of "policy" could quiet his "abhor- 
rence " of the President, whose impeachment 
for moving troops to the Sabine he suggest- 
ed. When warned of the effect of its opposi- 
tion to annexation on the Whig ticket, the 
Tribune (June 12), while conceding that the 
annexation question would cause Clay to lose 
Louisiana, and make Georgia and Tennessee 
very close, replied, "Nay, friends, we always 
say what we think when we speak at all." 
The slavery question was, however, "com- 
mingled " with Texas annexation, and Gree- 
ley was soon forced to recognize this, and to 
change his front. This he did in an editorial 
on August 31, in which he thus expressed 
himself : 

"We see in this Texas iniquity, from its 
first secret and fraudulent inception in Ten- 
nessee and at the White House ten years ago 
to its present maturity, a conspiracy to cir- 
cumvent ' the inevitable laws of population,' 
and thereby secure a prolonged and unnatural 
146 



The Antislavery Contest 

duration of slavery. To this conspiracy tlie 
free States can not become parties, even by a 
skulking connivance, without fearful guilt. 
They ought to have taken their stand against 
any extension of their responsibility for sla- 
very when Louisiana was acquired, but they 
neglected it, and thereby prolonged the ex- 
istence of slavery in the Union at least half 
a century." 

On November 28, following Clay's defeat, 
the Tribune set forth its views on Texas and 
slavery in an editorial nearly two columns 
long. Still deprecating all sectional agita- 
tion, it reaffirmed its belief that the Govern- 
ment had no right to meddle with slavery in 
the existing slave States, but the danger of 
the disposition of those States to grasp for 
power was indicated, and its summing up 
(with its own italics) was as follows: "Brief- 
ly, then, we stand on the ground of Opposi- 
tion to the Annexation of Texas so long as 
a vestige of slavery shall remain ivithiyi her 
borders." This marked the throwing down 
of the Tribune's gantlet to the slave power. 

The Texas annexation resolution passed 
the House on January 25, 1845 (with the aid 
of eight Southern Whig votes, twenty-seven 
Democrats voting nay), and the Senate on 
February 27 (three Whigs voting yea). The 
147 



Horace Greeley 



Tribune's comment was: "The mischief is 
done, and we are now involved in war. We 
have adopted a war ready-made, and taken 
upon ourselves its prosecution to the end." 
It was not ready, however, to join the Aboli- 
tionists, and when a Western Whig journal 
proposed, in the following spring, that the 
party raise the standard of emancipation, it 
declared that, for itself, it should continue 
to act in good faith with all. North and 
South, who supported Whig principles ; " if 
we shall ever feel that this is no longer 
possible, the Federal Union will for us exist 
no longer." 

Greeley was a zealous advocate of Clay's 
nomination as the Wliig presidential candi- 
date again in 1848, while conceding that it 
was just that the head of the Whig ticket 
should be a citizen of a free State, and he 
came home from the convention cast down. 
The convention had given the nomination to 
General Taylor, and had laid on the table and 
refused to vote on a resolution pledging the 
delegates "to abide the nomination with the 
understanding that the nominee, in good 
faith, accepts of it, and adheres to the great 
principles of the Whig party — no extension 
of slavery, and in favor of American indus- 
try." Greeley had stated in advance his ob- 
148 



The Antislavery Contest 

jections to General Taylor — the fact that his 
views on public questions were not known, 
that he was supported as a slave-owner, and 
that his election would stimulate the war 
spirit, and set a bad example to young men. 
He did not place the ticket at the head of the 
Tribune's columns, but in a long editorial re- 
viewed the situation, and said: "We shall 
take time for reflection. If it shall appear 
to us that the support of General Taylor is 
the only course by which the election of Cass 
can be prevented, we shall feel bound to con- 
cur in that support." ^The Free-soil Demo- 
crats called a convention to meet in Buffalo 
on August 9, and on July 31 the Tribune re- 
stated its objections to Taylor, and refused 
to come out for him until the Buffalo conven- 
tion and the August elections made it certain 
that Taylor or Cass must be chosen. On 
June 27 a Taylor ratification meeting was 
held in New York city, which adopted the 
following among other resolutions: 

"Resolved, That we deprecate sectional 
issues in a national canvass, as dangerous to 
the Union and injurious to the public good; 
that we look with confidence to a Whig ad- 
ministration to remove all causes for such is- 
sues, and that we will countenance no faction 
of the Whig party, and no coalition with any 
149 



Horace Greeley 



faction out of it, wliich shall threaten to 
array one section of our common country in 
angry hostility against another." 

This was the voice of those Northern 
"business interests " which gave so much en- 
couragement to the slave power, and Greeley 
seized the opportunity to rebuke it. The 
Tribune the next day declared that the sim- 
ple meaning of the resolution was that 
"strenuous and consistent hostility to the ex- 
tension of slavery is factious," and con- 
tinued : 

"Gentlemen of Wall Street, and sharp, 
shrewd calculators generally ! be entreated to 
understand this matter aright. The hearts 
of the people are fully set in them to stop the 
passage of the Rio Grande by Human Slavery, 
and they will not be turned aside. They may 
be cajoled, deluded, and betrayed; but if they 
shall be, then woe to their betrayers. The 
Whigs of the North want to vote with their 
party, for President and all, if they can do 
so without voting to favor the extension of 
slavery, and that you must not ask them to 
do unless you wish to upset your dish alto- 
gether. . . . Over and over again this State 
has said, through her Legislature and her 
delegation in Congress, ' There must be no 
planting of slavery on free soil.' Do you 
150 



The Antislavery Contest 

think you can stifle this by your babble of 
' faction ' and * sectional issues ' ! " 

Of the Van Buren-Adams ticket, nomi- 
nated at Buffalo, it said that it presumed that 
that ticket would receive the votes of nearly 
all who regarded resistance to slavery exten- 
sion as the paramount duty of the day, and 
indicated that it was among those so defined 
by declaring that, while it did not lose sight 
of the importance of the protection of home 
industries, internal improvements, a sound 
financial policy, etc., it deemed "the limita- 
tion of slavery to its present legal domain 
more imminent than any or all of them." It 
gave more attention to Irish than American 
politics in August and September; but the 
Whig hold on Greeley was a strong one, and 
at a meeting in Vauxhall on September 27 
he confessed his belief that only by support- 
ing Taylor could Cass be defeated, and the 
Taylor ticket appeared on his editorial page 
two days later. He never, however, became 
enthusiastic over the candidate, and, writing 
from Washington to the Tribune about the 
inauguration ball, he said: "Had the dancing 
part of my education been less shockingly 
neglected, I should not have felt like dancing 
now." 

While a member of Congress (Greeley 
151 



Horace Greeley 



was elected that year) he took every oppor- 
tunity to oppose the slave power. He did not 
obtain the floor to speak in favor of the reso- 
lution (which was passed) declaring the traf- 
fic in human beings as chattels in Washing- 
ton "a notorious reproach to our country 
throughout Christendom," and directing the 
reporting of a bill prohibiting the slave-trade 
in the District of Columbia, but he wrote to 
the Tribune, "I could have wished that it had 
occurred on Forefathers' Day; but perhaps 
it is better as it is. The sons of the Pilgrims 
throughout the Union, as they assemble to- 
morrow to celebrate their fathers' landing on 
these shores, may greet each other on the de- 
cision of to-day." He opposed the introduc- 
tion of slavery in New Mexico, and, when it 
was proposed to refer the Texas boundary 
question to the United States Supreme Court, 
he objected on the ground that a majority of 
the court were slave-owners. 

The next great slavery contest that en- 
gaged the attention of the country was over 
the famous Clay "Compromise of 1850." In 
his autobiography Greeley says, "Mr. Clay's 
proffer seemed to me candid and fair to the 
North, so far as it related to the newly ac- 
quired territories." But even this guarded 
statement does not give a fair presentation 
152 



The Antislavery Contest 

of Greeley's part in this struggle. He did 
not accept any part of the compromise at the 
start. He announced open rebellion against 
his old leader's position. He repudiated the 
argument of Webster in the 7th of March 
speech. He did ally himself, later in the con- 
test, with the compromisers, but only to find 
that the so-called compromise was an apple of 
discord, which did as much as anything else 
preceding the war to arouse Northern opin- 
ion, make clear the aim of the slave power, 
and elect an antislavery President. 

Clay's compromise and Webster's famous 
speech had their origin in the fear that the 
South would attempt to destroy the Union, 
and Henry Wilson almost excuses Webster 
in view of the picture which the orator drew 
of the conflict that such an attempt would 
incite. The South had been growing more 
and more restless under the continued oppo- 
sition to the introduction of slavery in Cali- 
fornia and New Mexico, the activity of the 
Northern Abolitionists, and such an indica- 
tion of the Northern temper as was seen in 
the vote concerning slavery in the District of 
Columbia. Greeley did not believe that the 
body politic in the South would ever mean 
disunion, and he was not to be coerced by the 
threats of what he considered to be the voice 
153 



Horace Greeley 



of only the actual slave-owners. With a 
speech by Calhoun in the Senate as a text, 
the Tribune said on June 29, 1848: 

"Thanks to a kind providence, and the 
manly straightforwardness of John C. Cal- 
houn, the great question of the extension or 
non-extension of human slavery under the 
flag of this republic is to be pressed to a deci- 
sion now. . . . Human slavery is at deadly 
feud with the common law, the common sense, 
and the conscience of mankind; nobody pre- 
tends to justify it but those who share in its 
gains and its guilt. God, Man, Nature, Re- 
ligion, Law, Reason, are all against it. . . . 
If the slavery propagandists are ready for 
the inevitable struggle, let no retreat be 
beaten by the champions of universal Free- 
dom. The people are looking on." ^ 

On December 23, 1848, a secret conference 
of the Senators and Representatives from the 
Southern States was held in the Senate cham- 

' The New York Evening Post, on January 4, 1850, charged 
that the editor of the Tribune, before he got home from Con- 
gress, was willing to divide the new territories with the slave- 
holders upon equitable terms. Greeley was out of town when 
this appeared, but on his return, in the Tribune of January 12, 
he made his oft-quoted reply : " You lie, villain ! wilfully, 
wickedly, basely lie I The editor of the Tribune was never 
willing to divide the territories with the slaveholders on any 
terms whatever." 

154 



The Antislavery Contest 

ber, and, after a number of adjourned meet- 
ings, a long address to their constituents was 
adopted, a motion to table the subject being 
lost by a vote of yeas, 28 ; nays, 60. This ad- 
dress, after reviewing the constitutional pro- 
vision concerning slavery, asserted the right 
of slave-owners to recover their slaves in 
free States, set forth the obstacles devised 
thereto and the existence of "secret combina- 
tions " in Northern States to induce slaves to 
escape; and complained of the "systematic 
agitation of the [slavery] question by the 
Abolitionists," which it pronounced "danger- 
ous to the rights of the South, and subversive 
of one of the ends for which the Constitution 
was established." Regarding slavery in the 
Territories, it laid down this doctrine: "We 
ask not for the extension of slavery. . . . 
What we do insist on is that we shall not be 
prohibited from migrating, with our proper- 
ty, into the Territories of the United States 
because we are slaveholders." The enact- 
ments proposed in Congress to abolish sla- 
very and the slave-trade in the District of 
Columbia were cited, and it was declared that 
these " measures of aggression " must be met. 
Finally, the address strenuously urged " uni- 
ted action " on the part of the South, closing 
thus: "As the assailed, you would stand jus- 
155 



Horace Greeley 



tified by all laws, Imman and divine, in repel- 
ling a blow so dangerous without looking to 
consequences, and to resort to all means nec- 
essary for that purpose. Your assailants, 
and not you, would be responsible for the 
consequences." 

The proceedings of these caucuses were 
published on January 30, and the Tribune 
with them printed an editorial in which it as- 
serted that nothing was ever "better adapted 
to the great work of arousing and fixing the 
North," and added: "Then, as to the other 
monstrous grievance, the free States — 
shamed into manhood by the Abolitionists of 
various species ^ — will not permit the exten- 
sion of slavery. The vast regions that came 
to us free must remain so." 

In October, 1849, a State convention in 
California adopted unanimously a constitu- 
tion which excluded slavery, and this was rati- 
fied by the people by a vote of 12,066 to 811. 
At the instance of Mississippi, a convention 
of the Southern people was called to meet in 
Nashville, Tenn., in June, 1850, to deliberate 
on the threatened rights of the South, and 

' This was anticipatory of Lincoln's declaration : " I have 
been only the instrument. The logic and moral power of 
Garrison and the antislavery people of the country, and the 
army, have done all." 

156 



The Antislavery Contest 

talk of disunion became more wide-spread. 
In the North public opinion was quite as em- 
phatic, and by July, 1849, the Legislature of 
every free State but Iowa had instructed its 
representatives in Congress to vote against 
the introduction of slavery in territories 
where it was not already authorized. In Jan- 
uary, 1850, President Taylor recommended to 
Congress the admission of California. 

On January 29 of that year Clay intro- 
duced his famous compromise resolutions. 
They favored the admission of California, 
and the establishment of territorial govern- 
ments in lands acquired from Mexico, without 
any conditions as to slavery; declared it in- 
expedient to abolish slavery in the District of 
Columbia, while it continued in Maryland, 
and without the consent of the people of the 
District, but opposed the slave-trade therein ; 
pronounced in favor of a more efficient provi- 
sion for the restitution of fugitive slaves, and 
asserted that Congress had no power to pro- 
hibit or abolish trade in slaves between slave- 
holding States. 

The Tribune parted from its leader at 
once, and on January 31 compared Clay's ef- 
fort to secure peace to the man who rushed 
between a fighting husband and wife, and was 
whipped by both. "No," it declared, "we are 
157 



Horace Greeley 



not yet ready for compromise on either side. 
Thus far our side has lost by compromise, 
and gained by struggles. We know well that 
Mr. Clay's heart is right, and that his views 
are temperate and far-seeing. But their 
adoption by the North as its own, in the pres- 
ent state of the case, is quite another affair." 
On February 1 it added to this protest, "To 
countermarch in the face of a determined and 
formidable foe is peril if not ruin. Our tower 
of strength and of safety is the Wilmot pro- 
viso." "Let the Union be a thousand times 
shivered," it said two weeks later, "rather 
than we should aid you to plant slavery on 
free soil." 

Greeley devoted a column on March 9 to 
the notable speech of Daniel Webster made 
two days previous. The following citations 
will show his spirit : 

"At such a crisis as the present there is 
no safe light but that of principle. He who 
tries to be guided by any other will err in the 
fruitless vague, or land his followers in the 
ditch. Expediency may debate the steps to 
be taken, but it must be principle that deter- 
mines the end. ... It takes courage to face 
an enemy in battle; it takes more courage 
to confront a great enemy in politics. . . . 
The position that Northern States and their 
■ 158 



The Antislavery Contest 

citizens are morally bound to recapture fugi- 
tive slaves may be good for a lawyer, but it 
is not good for a man. . . . But the Union! 
Preserve the Union. . . . "We say that it is 
not in danger ! Thank God, it does not exist 
by the pleasure of politicians, but by an over- 
ruling necessity of things. It can not be dis- 
solved. It is not only the enactment of Na- 
ture and God, but it is fortified by an admi- 
rable Constitution, by the whole power of the 
American people, and by the clear-headed, 
true-hearted, and strong-handed administra- 
tion which now guides our destiny." 

But Greeley abandoned the vital part of 
the views he had thus set forth. When, after 
a debate of three months, a bill, reported by 
a special committee of which Clay was chair- 
man, and known as the "omnibus bill," con- 
taining the substance of Clay's resolutions, 
was reported, Greeley went to Washington, 
and in his correspondence with the Tribune 
classed himself among the compromisers. 
This bill was in itself a further compromise, 
as it omitted Clay's original declaration that 
"slavery does not exist by law." The Trib- 
une even abandoned that "tower of strength 
and safety," the Wilmot proviso, saying on 
August 5: "Our opinion of the propriety and 
legality of the Wilmot proviso has not 
159 



Horace Greeley 



changed one hair, but the necessity for it is 
now far less than it has been. Give us Cali- 
fornia admitted, and territorial governments 
for New Mexico and Utah, and we will forego 
the Wilmot proviso, though we think we ought 
to have this and all the others besides." 

Even the "omnibus bill" was a failure, 
and it seemed probable that no legislation on 
the subject would be secured. Then came the 
elevation of Fillmore to the presidency 
through Taylor's death, and after that Con- 
gress passed four separate bills', which Fill- 
more signed. The first of these admitted 
California as a free State. The second ad- 
justed the Texas boundary, giving the State 
$10,000,000 as an indemnity, and also organ- 
ized New Mexico as a Territory, the State or 
States formed from which should be admit- 
ted "with or without slavery, as their consti- 
tutions may prescribe." The third bill 
amended the fugitive slave law of 1793 by 
providing new machinery for the capture of 
such slaves, and imposing a fine not exceed- 
ing $1,000 and imprisonment for not more 
than six months on any one who obstructed 
the enforcement of the law, or concealed a 
fugitive. A fourth bill forbade the traffic in 
slaves in the District of Columbia. 

The Tribune realized at once that the 
160 



The Antislavery Contest 

slave power had won in this great contest, 
and it refused to accept the result as a Whig 
victory. When, in October, it was proposed 
to hold in New York city a great meeting to 
indorse the peace measures, the Tribune 
said: "Forty Abolition meetings will not ad- 
vance the antislavery sentiment so much as 
one grand mercantile city meeting to put 
down Free-soilism and make a finish of anti- 
slavery excitement." Greeley was not even 
to be won over by an appeal to the peril there 
might be to the tariff in Whig discord, and, 
replying to an article in the Richmond (Va.) 
Whig, he said: " If it [the Tribune] can only 
procure protection to the labor of New York 
by conspiring to rob the laborers of Virginia 
of their just earnings, it will spurn the bar- 
gain." 

All that there was in the nature of pacify- 
ing compromise in the act of 1850 was over- 
shadowed by the practical effect of the at- 
tempts to enforce the new fugitive slave law. 
Greeley early declared that the existence of 
this law might be "endured " so long as it 
was rarely enforced, "but no longer," and he 
openly expressed his sympathy with every 
effort made in the North to obstruct it. 
When a "Union and Safety Committee," rep- 
resenting "commercial interests " in New 
13 161 



Horace Greeley 



York city, in September, 1851, circulated a 
petition declaring that a further agitation of 
the slavery question would be "fraught with 
incalculable danger to our Union," and ur- 
ging that no one should vote for a Congres- 
sional candidate opposed to the new peace 
measures, the Tribune vigorously opposed 
this pledge, and on November 6 it thus re- 
stated its position: 

"For our own part, living within the very 
shadow of the temple wherein the god Cotton 
is worshiped, we defy the priests who offi- 
ciate at the altar to do their worst. We tell 
them that from the depths of our soul we 
hate and abhor human slavery, and every in- 
stitution, law, or usage whereby the poor and 
feeble are racked and lashed to make them 
minister to the pomp and luxury of the 
wealthy and powerful. We tell them that we 
feel thaj: the soil we tread is desecrated, the 
air we breathe polluted, by the inhuman 
slave-hunts which an ill-considered compact, 
made when our fathers were themselves vir- 
tually slaveholders, compels us not to oppose 
by any other than a moral resistance. We tell 
them that we will not be instrumental in for- 
cing back into bondage those who have es- 
caped therefrom; but, while we would dis- 
suade all from violent resistance to any legal 
162 



The Antislavery Contest 

mandate, we will ourselves cheerfully go to 
prison, or bear any penalty which our refusal 
may invoke, rather than aid to consign an 
innocent fellow being to perpetual bondage." 

The Tribune favored the nomination of 
General Scott for President in 1852, but said 
of the declaration of the Whig platform in 
favor of the compromise of 1850, and depre- 
cating further agitation of the slave question, 
"If there be any five thousand Whigs whose 
voting for the Whig candidate depends on 
our agreeing not to speak in reprehension of 
slavery, or our agreeing to give any ' aid and 
comfort ' to the hunting and catching of fugi- 
tive slaves, they may as well take up their 
beds and walk, for we mean to stay in the 
Whig party, and not to keep silence about 
slavery, nor * acquiesce ' in fugitive-slave 
hunting. So if this is to drive Whigs into 
the Loco-f oco camp, they may as well go now 
as any time." 

Of the result of this campaign Greeley 
said in his autobiography, "The Whig party 
had been often beaten before; this defeat 
proved it practically defunct, and in an ad- 
vanced stage of decomposition." 

On January 4, 1854, Stephen A. Douglas 
reported to the Senate, with amendments, a 
bill introduced by Dodge, of Iowa, to organ- 
163 



Horace Greeley 



ize the Territory of Nebraska. This was the 
practical beginning of the contest known in 
our history as the Kansas-Nebraska struggle. 
Douglas's report set forth that the compro- 
mise measures of 1850 rested on the principle 
that all questions pertaining to slavery in the 
Territories, and the States formed from 
them, were to be decided by the people there- 
of, and his bill provided that Nebraska, when 
admitted, should be received with or without 
slavery, as its constitution should provide. 

The Tribune attacked this position at 
once, spoke of Douglas as "down on his mar- 
row-bones at the feet of slavery," and added: 

"Although antislavery is weak in political 
circles, it was never stronger with the masses 
of the people. The great heart of the country 
is sound. Thousands and millions of true 
men all over the North wait but the occasion 
for a practical demonstration of their power, 
to show how firm is their attachment to the 
principle of freedom, and how deeply they 
scorn the shallow fools who have the imperti- 
nence to talk about ' crushing out ' those prin- 
ciples." 

The Tribune fought the proposed legisla- 
tion step by step, but in vain, and when the 
bill passed the House (after midnight on May 
23), it said "The revolution is accomplished, 
164 



The Antislavery Contest 

and slavery is king. How long shall this 
monarch reign? This is now the question 
for the Northern people to answer. . . . Con- 
spiracy has done its worst. Treason has done 
its worst. Who comes to the rescue f . . . 
Perhaps some such gigantic outrage upon the 
living sentiment of the North as the defeat 
of the Missouri compromise was necessary to 
arouse and consolidate the hosts of freedom 
in the free States." 

The Kansas-Nebraska question created a 
new alinement of parties. Greeley credited 
Douglas and Pierce with having made more 
Abolitionists in three months than Garrison 
and Phillips could have made in fifty years. 
The purpose of the slave power was rendered 
clearer, and the Northern determination to 
resist it was strengthened. The Tribune's 
files are a sufficient demonstration of the part 
it took in the formation of the new Northern 
sentiment, and Greeley's willingness to ac- 
cept the compromise measures when they 
were in process of formation increased his 
authority when he interpreted the actual re- 
sult. Now Whigs like Greeley and Seward, 
Free-soilers like Sumner and Chase, Aboli- 
tionists like Owen Love joy and Giddings, and 
Democrats like Trumbull and Blair saw a 
common ground on which they could fight 
165 



Horace Greeley 



under the same banner; and on this ground 
the foundation of the new Republican party 
was laid in 1854. Henry Wilson says : 

"At the outset, Mr. Greeley was hopeless, 
and seemed disinclined to enter upon the con- 
test. So often defeated by Northern defec- 
tion therein, he distrusted Congress, nor had 
he faith that the people would reverse the ver- 
dict of their representatives. He told his as- 
sociates that he would not restrain them, but, 
as for himself, he had no heart for the strife. 
But they were more hopeful. . . . Even Mr. 
Greeley himself became inspired by the grow- 
ing enthusiasm, and some of the most trench- 
ant articles were from his practised and pow- 
erful pen." ^ 

Greeley was in Washington during the 
contest which, in 1855-56, resulted finally in 
the election of N. P. Banks, of Massachusetts, 
as Speaker of the House. While the outcome 
was uncertain, Albert Rust, of Arkansas, in- 
troduced a resolution declaring it the senti- 
ment of the House that Banks (who lacked 
only three or four votes of election) and the 
three other leading candidates should forbid 
the use of their names any longer. Greeley 
considered this attempt to dictate to the 

' Rise and Fall of the Slare Power, ii, p. 407. 

166 



The Antislavery Contest 

House a gross outrage, and called it, in his 
correspondence with the Tribune, "a more 
discreditable proposition than I had ever 
known gravely submitted to a legislative 
body." Thereupon Rust, on January 23, 
struck Greeley several blows with his fist as 
the editor was walking through the Capitol 
grounds, and repeated the assault when Gree- 
ley came up with him on his way to his hotel, 
breaking a cane over his critic's arm and in- 
flicting on him a severe bruise. Greeley re- 
fused to prosecute his assailant, saying that 
he "did not choose to be beaten for money," 
and that he did not think an antislavery ed- 
itor could get justice in a Washington court. 
It was in 1856 also that the Tribune was 
indicted in Harrison County, Virginia, on a 
charge of publishing in New York, and cir- 
culating in Virginia, a newspaper which in- 
cited negroes to insurrection, and "inculcated 
resistance to the rights of property of mas- 
ters in their slaves " ; and its agent there was 
indicted for getting up a club of the paper. 
Neither indictment ever came to trial. 

After the nomination of Fremont for 
President, in 1856, the Tribune conceded that 
the odds were greatly in favor of the Demo- 
crats, and in announcing his defeat it said, 
"We have lost a battle. The Bunker Hill of 
1G7 



Horace Greeley 



the new struggle for freedom is past; the 
Saratoga and Yorktown are yet to be 
achieved." 

The great political events between the 
presidential years 1856 and 1860 were the 
Dred Scott decision in 1857, allowing slave- 
holders to take their slaves into the Territo- 
ries; the Lecompton (Kan.) contest in Con- 
gress, and the Lincoln-Donglas debate in 

1858, and John Brown's raid in Virginia in 

1859. The Tribune held that Taney's deci- 
sion was "entitled to just so much moral 
weight as would be the judgment of a major- 
ity of those congregated in any Washington 
bar-room " ; it fought for free Kansas, and 
of the John Brown incident it said: 

"There will be enough to heap execration 
on the memory of these mistaken men. We 
leave this work to the fit hands and tongues 
of those who regard the fundamental axioms 
of the Declaration of Independence as ' glit- 
tering generalities.' Believing that the way 
to universal emancipation lies not through 
insurrection, civil war, and bloodshed, but 
through peace, discussion, and the quiet dif- 
fusion of sentiments of humanity and justice, 
we deeply regret this outbreak. But, remem- 
bering that, if their fault was grievous, griev- 
ously have they answered it, we will not 
168 



The Antislavery Contest 

by one reproachful word disturb the bloody 
shrouds wherein John Brown and his com- 
patriots are sleeping. They dared and died 
for what they felt to be the right, though in 
a manner which seems to us fatally wrong. 
Let their epitaphs remain unwritten until the 
not distant day when no slave shall clank his 
chains in the shades of Monticello or by the 
groves of Mt. Vernon." 



169 



CHAPTER VIII 

DIJEING THE CIVIL WAR 

One who has followed Greeley's course in 
opposition to the slave power after 1850 
might expect to find him an aggressive leader 
in the contest when his desire to see in the 
presidential chair a resident of a free State 
elected by Free-soilers was gratified, and 
when that decision of the people was met by 
threats of breaking up the Union. But Gree- 
ley was, in fact, neither far-seeing in things 
political nor aggressive in the face of actual 
danger, and when aggressiveness counted 
most. He lacked that more exacting courage 
required "to confront a great enemy in poli- 
tics " for which he had expressed admiration 
while the Compromise of 1850 was pending. 
Combined with this was distrust of Lincoln 
and his official advisers, a constant inclina- 
tion during the war to obtrude his advice 
and his services where they could only cause 
annoyance and do harm, and a weakness of 
judgment in essential matters — all of which 
170 



During the Civil War 

seemed to justify Garrison in characterizing 
him as "the worst of all counselors, the most 
unsteady of all leaders, the most pUant of 
all compromisers in times of great public 
emergency." 

To understand clearly Greeley's conduct 
during Lincoln's administration it is neces- 
sary to retrace our steps in presenting the 
narrative of his career. 

What might be called the foundation prin- 
ciple of Greeley's early idea of journalism 
was independence of thought, and in the Log 
Cabin he laid down this very correct view of 
editorial office-holding : 

"If the administration has resolved that 
no individual shall be appointed to any office 
as a reward for any real or imaginary service 
to the Whig cause as a partizan editor, and 
that the holding of office under the Federal 
Government and the editing of a partizan 
newspaper at the same time are incompatible, 
we do not hesitate to say that it has made a 
wise and beneficent decision." 

By 1849 he had so far modified this view 
that he wrote (May 5) : "We trust editors 
will not come to regard office as a goal and 
recompense for their labors, but that they 
will not, on the other hand, be deemed ineli- 
gible by reason of their calling." Then he 
171 



Horace Greeley 



became ambitious to bold an office bimself. 
To one wbo realizes the power that he pos- 
sessed as an editor, it may seem strange that 
he should be willing to devote to public af- 
fairs any of the time that his editorial duties 
demanded, or that he should come to believe 
that a public office would add to his popular 
repute. But most of the big men in politics 
in those days did receive political rewards. 
Weed, it is true, was content to pull the wires 
— accepting only the position of State Print- 
er; but Seward had been Governor and was 
a United States Senator ; Greeley had helped 
elect scores of men to Congress and to the 
Legislature, and in the opposition party in 
his own State he had seen Van Buren, Marcy, 
and Silas Wright honored with one important 
office after another. So he came to feel that 
he was left neglected in his editorial room, 
and in 1854 he approached Weed with the 
query whether "the time and circumstances " 
were not favorable for his nomination for 
Governor. The Tribune had for some years 
been advocating the adoption of the Maine 
prohibition law in New York State,^ and 

' As a city excise measure Greeley proposed in 1844 to 
abolish all license fees, and assess on the sellers of liquor, retail 
and wholesale, the carefully ascertained cost of the pauperism 
caused by rum. 

172 



During the Civil War 

Greeley was then classed among the nltra- 
prohibitionists. Weed's reply was that, al- 
though he was ready to admit that Greeley 
in the Tribune had educated the people up 
to the acceptance of his own temperance 
views for the State, the Weed men could not 
control the nomination, and that, while Gree- 
ley had shaken the temperance bush, Myron 
H. Clark was the man who would catch the 
bird. Greeley acquiesced in this opinion, but 
he soon after went to Albany and asked Weed 
if there was any objection to his running for 
Lieutenant-Governor. This request was a 
fair illustration of Greeley's ignorance of 
the practical side of politics, and Weed was 
obliged to point out to him how impolitic it 
would be to make up a ticket with two ultra- 
temperance men at its head. Again Greeley 
acquiesced, but when the convention resulted 
in the nomination of his rival, Henry J. Ray- 
mond, for Lieutenant-Governor, he was so ex- 
asperated that he held Weed responsible for 
Raymond's nomination, and accused Weed of 
concealing his intention in his conversation 
with him.^ 

Late in that campaign Greeley wrote to 
Seward that he wanted "an earnest talk'* 

^ Weed's Autobiography, ii, p. 237. 

173 



Horace Greeley 

with him as soon as the election was over, 
adding: "I have held in as long as I can, or 
shall have by that time. ... I have tried to 
talk to Weed, but with only partial success. 
Weed likes me and always did — I don't think 
he ever had a dog about his house he likes 
better — but he thinks I know nothing about 
politics. If there are any plans for the fu- 
ture I want to know what they are, and if 
there are none, I want to know that fact, and 
I will try to form a plan of some sort my- 
self." In other words, Greeley did not pro- 
pose to be left out of the future Whig coun- 
cils. " No other journal had done so much as 
the Tribune," says Seward's biographer, "to 
make Seward the idol of the antislavery peo- 
ple of various degrees," If there was a sus- 
picion of a breach of trust in the Seward- 
Greeley-Weed firm, Greeley would naturally 
address any complaint to Seward. 

Stung by the outcome of the election, in 
which the ticket bearing Raymond's name was 
successful, Greeley, without seeking an in- 
terview with Seward, addressed to him a 
letter that has become famous. It was dated 
November 11, 1854, and it opened with the 
following words: "Governor Seward — The 
election is over, and its result sufficiently as- 
certained. It seems to me a fitting time to 
174 



During the Civil War 

announce to you the dissolution of the polit- 
ical firm of Seward, Weed, and Greeley, by 
the withdrawal of the junior partner, said 
withdrawal to take effect on the morning 
after the first Tuesday in February next " 
(when Seward would be elected United 
States Senator). The letter, which was a 
long one, went over Greeley's first acquaint- 
ance with Weed, set forth his editorial la- 
bors up to the time of Harrison's election, 
and said: "Now came the great scramble of 
the swell mob of coon minstrels and cider 
suckers at Washington — I not being counted 
in. Several regiments of them went on from 
this city, but no one of the whole crowd, 
though I say it who should not, had done so 
much toward General Harrison's nomination 
as yours respectfully. I asked nothing, ex- 
pected nothing; but you. Governor Seward, 
ought to have asked that I be Postmaster of 
New York. Your asking would have been in 
vain; but it would have been an act of grace 
neither wasted nor undeserved. . . . AYhen 
the Whig party, under your rule, had offices 
to give, my name was never thought of; but 
when, in 1842-'43, we were hopelessly out of 
power, I was honored with the party nomina- 
tion for State Printer. When we came again 
to have a State Printer to elect as well as 
175 



Horace Greeley 



nominate, the place went to Weed, ias it 
ought. ... If a new office had not been cre- 
ated on purpose to give its valuable patron- 
age to H. J. Raymond and enable St. John 
to show forth his Times as the organ of the 
Whig State administration, I should have 
been still more grateful." 

Reviewing the recent campaign, he contra- 
dicted what Weed in his later autobiography 
said about seeking the nomination for Gov- 
ernor, saying that, when Weed called on him 
to state why he could not support him for 
that nomination, " I [Greeley] had never 
asked nor counted on his support." He 
"should have hated to serve as Lieutenant- 
Governor," but would have "gloried in run- 
ning " so as to have had all his enemies upon 
him at once. But the nomination was given 
to Raymond, and he [Greeley] made the 
fight. The letter closed by saying that the 
writer trusted that they should never be 
found in opposition; "all I ask is that we 
shall be counted even on the morning after 
the first Tuesday in February, as aforesaid, 
and that I may thereafter take such course 
as seems best without reference to the past." 

Seward did not even inform Weed of the 
contents of this letter, and Weed was igno- 
rant of them until its publication, after Ray- 
176 



During the Civil War 

mond, in a letter in the Times explaining 
Seward's defeat at Chicago in 1860, had hint- 
ed of it as supplying the motive for Greeley's 
opposition to Seward there. What Weed 
knew of the incident at the time from Seward 
was contained in the following letter: 

"Has Greeley written to you, or do you 
see him nowadays? Just before the election 
he wrote me an abrupt letter. I did not think 
it wise to trouble you about it. Then, when 
he thought all was gone through your blun- 
ders and mine, he came out in the paper and 
said as much in a chafed spirit. To-day I 
have a long letter from him, full of sharp, 
pricking thorns. I judge, as we might well 
know, from his, at bottom, nobleness of dis- 
position, that he has no idea of saying or 
doing anything wrong or unkind; but it is 
sad to see him so unhappy. Will there be a 
vacancy in the Board of Regents this winter? 
Could one be made at the close of the session? 
Could he have it? Raymond's nomination 
and election is hard for him to bear. I think 
this is a good letter to burn. I wish I could 
do Greeley so great a kindness as to burn 
his." 

From the date of his letter to Seward, 

Greeley showed a determination to give his 

own judgment free rein, and, perhaps 
13 177 



Horace Greeley 



through lack of influences that had previous- 
ly restrained him, his course became more 
and more erratic. We find an early illustra- 
tion of this in 1858 — the year of the famous 
Lincoln-Douglas debate in Illinois — when he 
favored the acceptance of Douglas as the Re- 
publican candidate for United States Sena- 
tor, and in a letter to a Chicago editor spoke 
of the failure to conciliate Douglas as spurn- 
ing and insulting the Republicans of other 
States, and added: "If Lincoln would fight up 
to the work also, you might get through. . . . 
You have got your elephant — you would have 
him — now shoulder him. He is not so heavy 
after all." His early lack of faith in the suc- 
cess of the Republican party was not over- 
come, and in writing to G. E. Baker on April 
28, 1859, he said: 

"I lack faith that the antislavery men of 
this country have either the numbers or the 
sagacity required to make a President. I do 
not believe there are a hundred thousand 
earnest antislaverymen in this State, or a 
million in the Union. . . . Slavery has not 
another body of servitors half so useful and 
efl&cient as the most rabid Abolitionists. . . . 
I hope Seward or Chase will be nominated 
on the platform of 1856, and then I will go 
to work for him with a will, but with perfect 
178 



During the Civil War 

certainty that we are to be horribly beaten. 
I only want to be in such a shape that, when 
the thing is over, I can say, ' I told you so.' 
I don't believe the time ever has been (or 
soon will be) when, on a square issue, the Re- 
publicans could or can poll one hundred elec- 
toral votes. But let her drive." ^ 

Greeley attended the National Republican 
Convention of 1860 not as a delegate from 
his own State, but as the representative of an 
Oregon district that had asked him to serve. 
He went to Chicago declaring that his can- 
didate was Edward Bates, of Missouri, a Vir- 
ginian by birth, and a lifelong slaveholder! 
"He was thoroughly conservative," Greeley 
afterward explained, "and so held fast to the 
doctrine of our revolutionary sages, that 
slavery was an evil to be restricted, not a 
good to be diffused. This conviction made 
him essentially a Republican; while I be- 
lieved that he could poll votes in every slave 
State, and if elected, rally all that was left 
of the Whig party therein to resist secession 
and rebellion." In a statement published 
soon after the nomination of Lincoln, Gree- 
ley said that he had considered the nomina- 
tion of Seward "unadvisable and unsafe," 

» Weed's Autobiography, ii, p. 255. 

179 



Horace Greeley 



but that Seward's defeat was due to the con- 
viction of the delegates from Pennsylvania, 
New Jersey, and Indiana that he could not 
carry those States. Thereupon Henry J. 
Raymond wrote from Seward's home a letter 
to the New York Times in which he gave a 
different account of Greeley's action at the 
convention. The letter was a very bitter one, 
as a few extracts from it will show: 

"The main work of the Chicago conven- 
tion was the defeat of Governor Seward, . . . 
and in that endeavor Mr. Greeley labored 
harder and did tenfold more than the whole 
family of Blairs, together with all the guber- 
natorial candidates to whom he modestly 
hands over the honors of the effective cam- 
paign. He had special qualifications as well 
as a special love for the task, to which none 
of the others could lay any claim. For twen- 
ty years he had been sustaining the political 
principles and vindicating the political con- 
duct of Mr. Seward through the columns of 
the most influential political newspaper in the 
country. . . . He had gone far beyond him 
in expressions of hostility to slavery, in pal- 
liation of armed attempts for its overthrow, 
and in assaults upon that clause of the Con- 
stitution which requires the surrender of the 
fugitive slaves; and he was known to have 
180 



The Union League Club, 

Madison Avenue, corner of Twenty-sixth Street, 

New-York, ../v\^. r?<^.._._ 187 



^y^-u 



Specimen of Greeley's handwriting. 





During the Civil War 

been for more than twenty years his personal 
friend and political supporter. . . . Mr. Gree- 
ley was in Chicago several days before the 
meeting of the convention, and he devoted 
every hour of the interval to the most steady 
and relentless prosecution of the main busi- 
ness which took him hither — the defeat of 
Governor Seward. He labored personally 
with the delegates as they arrived, commend- 
ing himself always to their confidence by pro- 
fessions of regard and the most zealous 
friendship for Governor Seward, but pre- 
senting defeat even in New York as the in- 
evitable result of his nomination. . . . While 
the contents of Greeley's letter of November 
11, 1854, to Seward were known to some of 
Seward's supporters who were working at 
Chicago, no use was made of this knowledge 
in quarters where it would have disarmed the 
deadly effect of his pretended friendship for 
the man upon whom he was thus deliberately 
wreaking the long-hoarded revenge of a dis- 
appointed office-seeker. He was still allowed 
to represent to the delegations from Ver- 
mont, New Hampshire, Ohio, Indiana, and 
other States known to be in favor of Gov- 
ernor Seward's nomination, that, while he 
desired it upon the strongest grounds of 
personal and political friendship, he be- 
181 



Horace Greeley 



lieved it would be fatal to the success of the 
cause." 

This was the first public reference that had 
been made to Greeley's letter to Seward. 
Greeley now demanded its publication, and 
this followed, and the actual rupture of the 
political firm then occurred. Weed reviewed 
the letter in the Albany Evening Journal 
with this summing up : 

"In conclusion, we can not withhold an ex- 
pression of sincere regret that this letter has 
been called out. Having remained six years 
in ' blissful ignorance ' of its contents, we 
should much prefer to have ever remained so. 
It jars harshly upon cherished memories. It 
destroys ideals of disinterestedness and gen- 
erosity which relieve political life from so 
much that is selfish, sordid, and rapacious." 

When, in 1861, the nomination for United 
States Senator at Albany lay between Gree- 
ley and William M. Evarts, and Greeley was 
gaining in the caucus balloting. Weed had 
the name of Ira Harris presented, and so 
snatched the nomination from his old friend. 
When, in 1869, Greeley accepted the nomina- 
tion for State Comptroller, after three can- 
didates on the ticket had declined their nomi- 
nations. Weed refused to support him, and 
wrote a letter in which he analyzed Greeley's 
182 



During the Civil War 

course in later years, and declared that it 
was "preposterous " to suppose that the ed- 
itor of a daily journal in New York could so 
divide his time as to discharge also the du- 
ties of Comptroller, The vote at the polls 
stood: Greeley, 307,688; Allen, 330,371.i 

Greeley met with denials the charges that 
his opposition to Seward's nomination was 
due to any personal hostility, saying in reply 
to Weed's statement: "The most careful 
scavenger of private letters or the most 
sneaking eavesdropper that ever listened to 
private conversation, can not allege a single 
reason for any personal hostility on my part 
against Mr. Seward. I have never received 
from him anything but exceeding kindness 
and courtesy. He has done me favors (not 
of a political nature) in a manner which made 
them still more obliging ; and I should regard 
the loss of his friendship as a very serious 
loss. Notwithstanding this, I could not sup- 
port him for President. I like Mr. Seward 
personally, but I love the party and its prin- 
ciples more." 

* Greeley was a member of the State Constitutional Con- 
vention in 1867. In 1870 he ran for Congress against S. S. Cox, 
and was defeated by a majority of 1,025 votes, the district giv- 
ing the Democratic candidate for Governor a majority of 1,745 
at the same election, 

183 



Horace Greeley 



The Albany Evening Journal charged 
that Seward's appointment by Lincoln as 
Secretary of State was made "against the 
persistent protestations of those who con- 
curred with the Tribune." The Tribune re- 
plied that it "promptly and heartily ap- 
proved " of Seward's selection, and let the 
new President know that its editor would not 
accept the Postmaster-Generalship.^ 

The announcement of Lincoln's election 
was followed by instant threats of secession 
on the part of the South, and by demands for 
concessions to the slave power by many in- 
terests — business and political — in the North. 
Greeley met this situation by taking the 
ground, in the Tribune of December 17, 1860, 
that, if the right of the colonists to rebel 
against Great Britain was justified by the 
"consent of the governed " clause of the Dec- 
laration of Independence, that clause would 
justify "the secession of five million of 
Southrons from the Federal Union in 1861." 
Jefferson's principle might be "pushed to ex- 
treme and baleful consequences " ; but, while 
he would not uphold the secession of Gov- 
ernor's Island from New York, if seven or 

* " There was no moment of Mr. Lincoln's rule when any 
place in his gift would have been accepted by Mr. Greeley." — 
Tribune, March 16, 1873. 

184 



During the Civil War 

eight contiguous States should secede from 
the Union he would not think it right to 
" stand up for coercion." If Mayor Fernando 
Wood had not had free trade in view, Greeley 
might have joined him in his suggestion to the 
Common Council of New York city on Jan- 
uary 6, 1861, that, if the Union, which, he 
held, could not be constitutionally kept to- 
gether by force, was dissolved, the city should 
separate from the State and establish a 
" Free City," which would have " cheap goods 
nearly free from duty." A week later he 
declared that, if any six or more of the cotton 
States wanted to secede, "we will do our best 
to help them out, not that we want them to 
go, but that we loathe the idea of compelling 
them to stay." The abstract right of a State 
to secede, under the Constitution, is upheld 
by some Republicans of prominence to-day. 
Without following their argument, it may be 
pointed out that what Washington had in 
view was an "inviolable Union," that "indis- 
soluble Union " which he recommended to the 
Governors of the States ; and that John Quin- 
cy Adams, in 1828, declared that, while the 
people of a State, "by the primitive right of 
insurrection against oppression " might de- 
clare their State out of the Union, "they have 
delegated no such power to their legislators 
185 



Horace Greeley 



or their judges ; and if there be such a right, 
it is the right of an individual to commit sui- 
cide — the right of an inhabitant of a popu- 
lous city to set fire to his own dwelling 
house." 

Greeley's declarations were eagerly ac- 
, cepted by the most radical defenders of seces- 
'' sion in the South, Tombs using them to 
strengthen his argument in favor of the con- 
stitutional right of secession before the Geor- 
gia convention,^ and they perplexed and 
alarmed the friends of Union in the North. 
Lincoln, realizing the harm which an editor of 
Greeley's influence could do to the Union 
cause, wrote to him, cautioning him against 
expressing such views. Greeley in his reply 
said that one State could no more secede at 

' In his American Conflict, written in 1864, Greeley quoted 
his editorial of December 17th in full, and in reasserting the 
possibility of justifying the free States in consenting to a with- 
drawal of the slave States from the Union, if that was the 
deliberate desire of the great body of their people, he added : 
" And the South had been so systematically, so outrageously, 
deluded by demagogues on both sides of the slave line, with 
regard to the nature and special importance of the Union to 
the North — it being habitually represented as an immense boon 
conferred on the free States by the slave, whose withdrawal 
would whelm us all in bankruptcy and ruin — that it might 
do something toward allaying the Southern inflammation to 
have it distinctly and plainly set forth that the North had no 
desire to enforce upon the South the maintenance of an ab- 
horred, detested Union." 

186 



During the Civil War 

its pleasure than one stave could secede from 
a cask, but that, if eight or ten States wanted 
to go, he would say, "There's the door, go." 
Still, if the seceding States began fighting 
while the Union was not yet dissolved, "I 
guess they will have to be made to behave 
themselves." The one thing he would object 
to would be "another nasty compromise." 
No more arguments in favor of secession ap- 
peared in the Tribune, and in January, 1861, 
Greeley wrote, "I deny to one State, or to a 
dozen different States, the right to dissolve 
this Union. It can only be legally dissolved 
as it was formed — by the free consent of all 
the parties concerned." Aside from its sup- 
port of Greeley's schemes for meddling, and 
its hostility to Lincoln, the Tribune vigorous- 
ly supported the Union cause during the war, 
and so concentrated on itself the hatred of 
the Southern sympathizers in New York city 
that, during the draft riots in 1863, its build- 
ing was attacked by the mob.^ 

When Lincoln's first call for troops came, 
and war was actually begun, the nation had 
had no experience in warfare for fifty years. 
It had to rely, too, not on an organized force, 

\ ' Henry Wilson gave to its managing editor, Sidney How- 

ard Gay, the credit of keeping the Tribune loyal during the 
war. 

187 



Horace Greeley 



but on raw recruits, hurriedly summoned 
from peaceful pursuits, and wlio had to be 
organized, drilled, fed, and sheltered under 
the direction of officers who were themselves 
without experience, save what some of them 
had been taught in the military school. But 
when a war begins, both sides are generally 
confident, and the desire of the public is for 
speedy action. It was so in 1861, and the 
Tribune soon gave voice to this desire by 
printing, day after day, on its editorial page, 
the following advice: 

"the nation's wak-cky 

"Forward to Richmond! Forward to 
Richmond! The rebel Congress must not be 
allowed to meet there on the twentieth of 
July! By that date the place must be held 
by the national army." 

When the advance was made, and the dis- 
aster of Bull Run followed, Greeley and the 
Tribune incurred what might be called a na- 
tional denunciation. "The battle of Bull 
Run," says Parton, "nearly cost the editor 
of the Tribune his life. Mr. Greeley was al- 
most beside himself with horror," to which 
"was added, perhaps, some contrition for hav- 
ing permitted the paper to goad the Govern- 
ment into an advance which events showed to 
188 



During the Civil War 

be either too late or premature." Greeley 
made a statement in July, 1861, in which he 
said that while the cry, "Forward to Rich- 
mond " was not his coining, and he would 
have preferred not to iterate it, he assumed 
the responsibility for it, but averred that 
neither he nor any one connected with the 
Tribune "ever commended or imagined any 
such strategy as the launching of barely thir- 
ty of the one hundred thousand Union volun- 
teers within fifty miles of Washington, 
against ninety thousand rebels, enveloped in 
a labyrinth of strong entrenchments, and un- 
reconnoitered masked batteries." This ex- 
planation of his position he repeated in later 
years, saying, for instance, in his most care- 
ful estimate of Lincoln ^ that the early delay 
was due to the President's "delusion" that 
"soft words would obviate all necessity for 
deadly strife," and that, because of this, 
"new volunteers were left for weeks to rot 
in idleness and dissipation in the outskirts 
and purlieus of Washington, because their 
commander-in-chief believed that it would 
never be necessary or advisable to load their 
muskets with ball cartridges." The extent of 
Greeley's panic was not disclosed until the 

* Address printed in the Century, July, 1891. 

189 



Horace Greeley 



publication of the following letter to Lincoln 
in 1887, many years after both he and Lin- 
coln were dead: 

" New York, Monday, July 29, 1S61. Midnight. 

"Dear Sir: This is my seventh sleepless 
night — yours, too, doubtless — yet I think I 
shall not die, because I have no right to die. 
I must struggle to live, however bitterly. But 
to business. You are not considered a great 
man, and I am a hopelessly broken one. You 
are now undergoing a terrible ordeal, and 
God has thrown the gravest responsibilities 
upon you. Do not fear to meet them. Can 
the rebels be beaten after all that has oc- 
curred, and in view of the actual state of feel- 
ing caused by our late awful disaster? If 
they can — and it is your business to ascer- 
tain and decide — write me that such is your 
judgment, so that I may know and do my 
duty. And if they can not be beaten — if our 
recent disaster is fatal — do not fear to sacri- 
fice yourself to your country. If the rebels 
are not to be beaten — if that is your judg- 
ment in view of all the light you can get — 
then every drop of blood henceforth shed 
in this quarrel will be wantonly, wickedly 
shed, and the guilt will rest heavily on the 
soul of every promoter of the crime. I pray 
190 



During the Civil War 

you to decide quickly, and let me know my 
duty. 

"If the Union is irrevocably gone, an ar- 
mistice for thirty, sixty, ninety, one hundred 
and twenty days — better still for a year — 
ought at once to be proposed with a view 
to a peaceful adjustment Then Congress 
should call a national convention, to meet at 
the earliest possible day. And there should 
be an immediate and mutual exchange or re- 
lease of prisoners and a disbandment of 
forces. I do not consider myself at present 
a judge of anything but the public sentiment. 
That seems to me everywhere gathering and 
deepening against a prosecution of the war. 
The gloom in this city is funereal — for our 
dead at Bull Run were many, and they lie 
unburied yet. On every brow sits sullen, 
scorching, black despair. It would be easy 
to have Mr. Crittenden move any proposi- 
tion that ought to be adopted, or to have it 
come from any proper quarter. The first 
point is to ascertain what is best that can 
be done — which is the measure of our 
duty — and do that very thing at the earliest 
moment, 

" This letter is written in the strictest con- 
fidence, and is for your eye alone. But you 
are at liberty to say to members of your Cab- 
191 



Horace Greeley 



inet that you know I will second any move- 
ment you may see fit to make. But do noth- 
ing timidly nor by halves. Send me word 
what to do. I will live till I can hear it, at 
all events. If it is best for the country and 
for mankind that we make peace with the reb- 
els at once, and on their own terms, do not 
shrink even from that. But bear in mind the 
greatest truth : ' Whoso would lose his life 
for my sake shall save it.' Do the thing that 
is the highest right, and tell me how I am to 
second you. 

"Yours, in the depth of bitterness, 
"Horace Greeley."^ 

Even this letter did not discourage the 
President. His biographers say: "He smiled 
at frettings like those of Scott, Dix, and Rich- 
ardson ; but letters like that of Greeley made 
him sigh at the strange weakness of human 
character. Such things gave him pain, but 
they bred no resentment, and elicited no 
reply." 

* The publication of this letter was a shock to Greeley's old 
Tribune office friends, and Samuel Sinclair, long his publisher, 
in a note to that journal, dated January 1, 1888, said : " When 
that letter was written Mr. Greeley had been and was still 
severely ill with brain fever ; the entire letter, in my judg- 
ment, revealed that he was on the verge of insanity when he 
wrote it." 

192 



During the Civil War 

Greeley's lack of faith in the ability of the 
North to preserve the Union by force of arms 
next manifested itself in efforts to settle the 
dispute by negotiation. With this end in 
view, he was ready to treat either with the 
representative of a foreign power or with 
any one assuming to represent the Confed- 
eracy. M. Mercier, the French minister at 
Washington, was openly friendly to the 
South. He had advised the Emperor Napo- 
leon to recognize the Confederacy and to 
raise the blockade, and was using all his in- 
fluence in behalf of the rebellious States. In 
1862 Greeley appealed to Mercier to secure 
the intervention of the French Government 
to end the war. Mercier commended the sug- 
gestion to his fellow diplomats in Washing- 
ton, urging that it was an indication of the 
weakness of even the radicals of the North, 
and declaring that the idea that Greeley 
would favor no step that would endanger the 
Union was "all bosh." 

The view of the administration at Wash- 
ington concerning these negotiations was set 
forth in a reply by Secretary Seward to a de- 
spatch from the French Foreign Secretary to 
M. Mercier, suggesting "informal confer- 
ences " with the Confederates to end the war. 
In this reply (dated February 6, 1863), Sew- 
14 193 



Horace Greeley 



ard repudiated the suggestion that the war 
had not been vigorously carried on, and said : 
"M. de I'Huys, I fear, has taken other light 
than the correspondence of this Government 
for his guidance in ascertaining its temper 
and firmness. He has probably read of divi- 
sions of sentiment among those who hold 
themselves forth as organs of public opinion 
here, and has given to them undue impor- 
tance." As to the appointment of commis- 
sioners by our Government and the Confed- 
erates, to meet on neutral ground and discuss 
the situation, he said: "The commissioners 
must agree in recommending either that the 
Union shall stand or that it shall be volun- 
tarily dissolved; or else they must leave the 
vital question unsettled, to abide at last the 
fortunes of war. . . . There is not the least 
ground to suppose that the controlling (in- 
surgent) actors would be persuaded at this 
moment, by any arguments which national 
commissioners could offer, to forego the am- 
bition that has impelled them to the disloyal 
position they are occupying. Any commis- 
sioners who should be appointed by these 
actors, or through their dictation or influence, 
must enter the conference imbued with the 
spirit and pledged to the personal fortunes 
of the insurgent chiefs. The loyal people in 
194 



During the Civil War 

the insurrectionary States would be unlieard, 
and any offer of peace by this Government, 
on the condition of the maintenance of the 
Union, must necessarily be rejected. On the 
other hand, as I have already intimated, this 
Government has not the least thought of re- 
linquishing the trust which has been confided 
to it by the nation under the most solemn of 
all political sanctions ; and, if it had any such 
thought, it would still have abundant reason 
to know that peace proposed at the cost of 
dissolution would be immediately, unreserv- 
edly, and indignantly rejected by the Amer- 
ican people." 

Henry J. Eaymond, in his journal,* men- 
tions that Collector Barney told him in 
"Washington, on January 25, 1863, that he 
knew that Greeley had been in correspond- 
ence with Vallandigham about mediation, and 
that later Greeley said to him (Raymond), 
on the Albany boat, that "he meant to carry 
out the policy of foreign mediation, and of 
bringing the war to a close. ' You'll see,' said 
he, * that I'll drive Lincoln into it.' " On the 
way back to New York one of the trustees of 
the Tribune Association told Raymond that 
the trustees would not permit Greeley to con- 

1 Scribner's Monthly, March, 1880. 

195 



Horace Greeley 



tinue the advocacy of intervention in the 
paper.^ 

Raymond also recalls an after-dinner con- 
versation in Washington, on January 26, 
1863, when Secretary Seward, Rev. Dr. Bel- 
lows, George Bancroft, General McDowell, 
and others were present, at which Seward 
spoke very bitterly of the effect of Greeley's 
negotiations with the French minister, and 
said that Greeley had clearly made himself 
liable to the penalties of the law forbidding 
such intercourse. 

In August, 1862, following McClellan's re- 
treat from the Virginia peninsula, Greeley 
addressed to President Lincoln through the 
columns of the Tribune a long letter under 
the title The Prayer of Twenty Millions, 
signed with his initials. It began by saying 
that the President must already know that 

* In one of its articles favoring mediation by a friendly 
foreign power, the Tribune (in January, 1863) said: "The 
prevalent opinion on that [European] side of the Atlantic 
blames us Unionists more than the rebels because it is their 
belief that the rebels are willing and anxious for peace on any 
terms that impartial judges shall deem fair, while our Govern- 
ment will listen to no terms short of unconditional submission 
to its authority, and this conviction does very great harm to 
our cause." It would therefore assume that a foreign offer of 
mediation was friendly and generous, and agree to consider 
arbitration when the Confederate assent thereto had been 
obtained. 

196 



During the Civil War 

his supporters "are sorely disappointed and 
deeply pained by the policy you seem to be 
pursuing with regard to the slaves of rebels." 
Under nine headings he set forth the specifi- 
cations of this charge, its main points being 
that the President was "strangely and disas- 
trously remiss " in regard to the emancipa- 
tion provisions of the new confiscation act; 
that the Union cause had suffered immense- 
ly from mistaken deference to rebel slavery ; 
that timid counsels in such a crisis were cal- 
culated to prove perilous; and that if the 
President, in his inaugural address, had 
given notice that, if rebellion was persisted 
in, he would "recognize no loyal person as 
rightfully held in slavery by a traitor," the 
rebellion would have received a staggering, 
if not fatal, blow. Finally, he demanded that 
the President give his subordinates direction 
that, under the confiscation act, the slaves of 
rebels coming or brought within the Union 
lines were to be free. 

This letter called out Lincoln's reply of 
August 22, in which he said: "My paramount 
object in this struggle is to save the Union, 
and is not either to save or destroy slavery. 
If I could save the Union without freeing any 
slave I would do it ; and if I could save it by 
freeing all slaves I would do it ; and if I could 
197 



Horace Greeley 



do it by freeing some, and leaving others 
alone, I would also do that. What I do about 
slavery and the colored race, I do because 
I believe it helps to save this Union." In 
less than a month from the receipt of Gree- 
ley's letter, Lincoln issued his emancipation 
proclamation. As some writers have held 
that this proclamation was a result of Gree- 
ley's prodding, it is interesting to obtain 
Greeley's own statement on this point. In his 
lecture on Lincoln, written about the year 
1868, he thus disposed of this matter: "I had 
not besought him to proclaim general eman- 
cipation; I had only urged him to give full 
effect to the laws of the land, which pre- 
scribed that slaves employed with their mas- 
ters' acquiescence in support of the rebellion 
should henceforth be treated as free by such 
employment, and by the general hostility of 
their owners to the national authority. I have 
no doubt that Mr. Lincoln's letter had been 
prepared before he ever saw my ' prayer,' 
and that this was merely used by him as an 
opportunity, an occasion, an excuse, for set- 
ting his own altered position — changed not at 
his volition, but by circumstances — fairly be- 
fore the country." ^ 

' Owen Lovejoy, writing to William Lloyd Garrison in Feb- 
ruary, 1864, about the reported influence which induced Lin- 

198 



During the Civil War 

Tlie earliest opposition to Lincoln's re- 
nomination manifested itself in a call for a 
convention to be held in Cleveland, Ohio, one 
week before the date of the National Repub- 
lican Convention. The New Yorkers who 
signed this call included advocates of the 
nomination of General Fremont, the Rev. 
George B. Cheever and Elizabeth Cady Stan- 
ton. B. Gratz Brown, Greeley's running mate 
in 1872, was one of the signers in St. Louis, 
and Wendell Phillips was a warm sympa- 
thizer with the movement. The convention, 
amid much disorder, nominated General Fre- 
mont for President, and John Cochran for 
Vice-President (both from the same State, 
the Constitution to the contrary, notwith- 
standing). Fremont accepted, but Cochran 

coin to issue the emancipation proclamation, said : " Now, the 
fact is this, as I had it from his own lips : He had written the 
proclamation in the summer, as early as June, I think — but 
will not be certain about the precise time — and called his Cab- 
inet together and informed them he had written it and meant 
to make it, but wanted to read it to them for any criticism or 
remarks as to features or details. After having done so, Mr. 
Seward suggested whether it would not be well for him to 
withhold its publication until after we had gained some sub- 
stantial advantage in the field, as at that time we had met 
with many reverses and it might be considered a cry of 
despair. He told me he thought the suggestion a good one, 
and so held on to the proclamation until after the battle of 
Antietam." 

199 



Horace Greeley 



withdrew his name, and the Cleveland ticket 
was not heard of further. 

Meanwhile, the Republicans all over the 
country were manifesting their demand for 
Lincoln's second nomination, and the work of 
the Baltimore convention was, so far as the 
head of the ticket was concerned, decided in 
advance. A committee, self-constituted, of 
which Greeley's long-time opponent William 
Cullen Bryant was a member, urged the Na- 
tional Republican Committee to postpone the 
convention. The Tribune made no editorial 
comment on Fremont's nomination, but the 
day before the Republican convention met it 
declared its conviction that the gathering 
should be postponed "while every effort of 
the loyal millions should be directed toward 
the overthrow of the armed hosts of the re- 
bellion," adding: "We feel that the expected 
nomination, if made at this time, exposes the 
Union party to a dangerous 'flank move- 
ment ' — possibly a successful one." 

When the renomination of Lincoln was 
made, the Tribune restated its objection. 
And what was if? That there were a large 
number of foes in our own household, at 
heart enemies of the national cause, who 
wanted the war to break down, and the Gov- 
ernment to be forced to make peace on the 
200 



During the Civil War 

rebels' terms ; that these men made their as- 
saults under cover of hostility to the admin- 
istration, and that "the renomination of Mr. 
Lincoln will inevitably intensify their efforts, 
and rebarb their arrows. . . . We believe the 
rebellion would have lost something of its co- 
hesion and venom from the hour in which it 
was known that a new President would surely 
be inaugurated on the fourth of March next ; 
and that hostility in the loyal States to the 
national cause must have sensibly abated, or 
been deprived of its most dangerous weapons, 
from the moment that all were brought to 
realize that the President, having no more to 
expect or hope, could henceforth be influenced 
by no conceivable motive but a desire to serve 
and save his country, and thus win for him- 
self an enviable and enduring fame." In the 
light of what we now know of Lincoln's part 
and Greeley's part in pushing the great 
struggle for the preservation of the nation to 
a successful end, it is unnecessary to com- 
ment on this proposal to surrender Lincoln 
as a sop to Northern "Copperheads," or on 
this stab at the motives of the man who was 
wearing his heart out in the nation's behalf. 
Greeley's hostility to Lincoln did not 
cease with the action of the National Kepub- 
lican Convention. The summer of 1864 was 
201 



Horace Greeley 



a trying one to all loyal hearts, and when 
August closed Grant had met with a check 
before Petersburg, Sherman was supposed 
still to be out of Atlanta, and the Democratic 
National Convention had pronounced the war 
a failure, and called for a cessation of hos- 
tilities. Two days after this platform was 
adopted, Greeley, on September 2, sent to the 
Governors of the loyal States a letter making 
three inquiries: "Is the reelection of Mr. Lin- 
coln a probability? Can your own State be 
carried for Mr. Lincoln? Do the interests of 
the Union party require the substitution of 
another candidate in place of Mr. Lincoln? " 
The replies of the loyal Governors were re- 
bukes to the editor's suggestion. How could 
they be otherwise? The withdrawal of the 
Republican candidate a few weeks before the 
election would have been an acknowledgment 
of weakness that would have meant party de- 
moralization and certain defeat at the polls, 
no matter who might have been put up in 
Mr. Lincoln's place. Verily, Thurlow Weed 
was correct when he thought that Greeley 
"knew nothing about politics." 

Greeley's defeat in his efforts to prevent 

Lincoln's renomination did not make him any 

more modest in playing the part of adviser 

to the administration. "In personal inter- 

202 



During the Civil War 

views, in private letters, and in the columns 
of the Tribune, he repeatedly placed before 
the President with that vigor of expression 
in which he was unrivaled the complaints 
and the discontents of a considerable body of 
devoted, if not altogether reasonable. Union 
men," thus drawing around him "a certain 
number of adventurers and busybodies, who 
fluttered between the two great parties, and 
were glad to occupy the attention of promi- 
nent men on either side with schemes whose 
only real object was some slight gain or ques- 
tionable notoriety for themselves." ^ One of 
these adventurers who gained Greeley's ear 
was William Cornell Jewett, "of Colorado," 
who had been an interminable epistolary ad- 
viser of the President. In July, 1864, he 
wrote Greeley from Niagara Falls that two 
Confederate ambassadors were then in Can- 
ada, with "full and complete powers for a 
peace," and urging Greeley to go on at once 
for the purpose of a private interview, or to 
obtain the President's protection, that they 
might meet Greeley in the United States. 

This proposition so impressed Greeley 
that he wrote to the President, reminding him 
that "our bleeding, bankrupt country also 



> Nicolay-Hay Lincoln, ix, p. 184. 
203 



Horace Greeley 



longs for peace ; shudders at the prospect of 
fresh conscriptions, of further wholesale dev- 
astation, and of new rivers of blood," disap- 
proving of the warlike tone of the platform 
on which Lincoln had just been renominated 
(Greeley's old rival, Henry J. Raymond had 
reported it), and suggesting, as terms of set- 
tlement, a Union restored and declared per- 
petual, the abolition of slavery, with com- 
plete amnesty, and a $400,000,000 indemnity 
for the freed slaves. In closing, he expressed 
a fear that Lincoln did not realize how in- 
tently the people desired " any peace con- 
sistent with the national integrity and hon- 
or," adding, "with United States stocks worth 
but forty cents in gold per dollar, and 
drafting about to commence on the third 
million of Union soldiers, can this be won- 
dered at? " 

Lincoln's patience and kindly treatment 
of Greeley throughout this episode are ad- 
mirably set forth in the Nicolay-Hay biogra- 
phy. Realizing the futility of the proposed 
negotiations, as well as Greeley's honesty of 
purpose, Lincoln decided to make use of 
his offer in order to show the country what 
such negotiations would amount to. So he 
placed Greeley in the front as negotiator, 
replying to him as follows: "If you can find 
204 



During the Civil War 

any person, anywhere, professing to have 
any proposition of Jefferson Davis in wri- 
ting, for peace, embracing the restoration of 
the Union and the abandonment of slavery, 
whatever else it embraces, say to him that 
he may come to me with you," nnder a 
safe-conduct. This broad acceptance of any 
authorized peace agent, under Greeley's guid- 
ance, puzzled the editor, and he first re- 
plied, expressing doubt whether the negotia- 
tors would "open their budget " to him. But 
very soon afterward he wrote Lincoln again, 
giving him in confidence the names of the 
Confederate agents (Clement C. Clay, of Ala- 
bama, and Jacob Thompson, of Mississippi), 
saying that he had reliable information of 
their authority and anxiety to confer with the 
President or such persons as he might au- 
thorize to treat with them, and urging prompt 
action, that it might do good in the coming 
North Carolina election. Greeley thus ig- 
nored the authority already given him to con- 
duct the peace agents to Washington ; but the 
patient Lincoln, in order to bring the matter 
to a head, sent Major John Hay (the present 
Secretary of State) to him with a letter 
expressing his disappointment that Greeley 
had not reached Washington with the Con- 
federate commissioners, repeating the invita- 
205 



Horace Greeley 



tion to bring them, and concluding, "I not 
only intend a sincere effort for peace, but 
intend that you shall be a personal witness 
that it is made." 

Greeley still hesitated, but he finally 
consented to go to Niagara if he should be 
furnished with a safe-conduct to Washington 
for four persons, and this was immediately 
granted. Upon his arrival at Niagara he 
sent by Jewett a letter to the Confederate 
negotiators, telling them of the safe-con- 
duct he had for them if they were " duly 
accredited from Richmond as the bearers of 
propositions looking to the establishment of 
peace." Thereupon he was informed that the 
men whom he was addressing had no such 
credentials; as they wrote to him later, that 
was "a character we had no right to assume, 
and had never affected to possess." They 
could only aver that they knew the view of 
their Government, and could get credentials. 
In other words, whatever terms might then 
have been proposed, would have been over- 
tures from the United States Government to 
the Confederates. But Greeley did not com- 
prehend this, and simply reported to Lincoln 
the reply he had received, and asked for fur- 
ther instructions. Lincoln's patience was not 
even then exhausted. He sent to Greeley at 
206 



During the Civil War 

once, by the hands of Major Hay, the follow- 
ing in his own handwriting: 

" Executive Mansion, Washington, July IS, 1864. 
''To Whom it May Concern: Any propo- 
sition which embraces the restoration of 
peace, the integrity of the whole Union, and 
the abandonment of slavery, and which comes 
by and with an authority that can control the 
armies now at war against the United States, 
will be received and considered by the Ex- 
ecutive Government of the United States, and 
will be met by liberal terms on other substan- 
tial points, and the bearer or bearers thereof 
shall have safe-conduct both ways. 

"Abraham Lincoln." 

The handing of this letter to one of the 
Confederates practically ended the negotia- 
tions. But Greeley, unknown to Major Hay, 
privately authorized Jewett to act as his 
(Greeley's) representative in regard to any 
future offers that might come from the Con- 
federates; Jewett made known to the latter 
his regrets over the " sad termination " of the 
deliberations; the Confederates sent him a 
letter addressed to Greeley, in which they at- 
tacked the President for alleged lack of good 
faith, and Jewett gave this letter to the news- 
papers. In the newspaper discussion of the 
207 



Horace Greeley 



matter that followed, Greeley agreed with 
the Confederates that the President's safe- 
conduct abrogated the condition he had orig- 
inally set forth, thus making a "rude with- 
drawal of a courteous overture for negotia- 
tion at a moment it was likely to be accepted," 
and being "an emphatic recall of words of 
peace just uttered, and fresh blasts of war 
to the bitter end." In the Tribune of August 
5, 1864, he held that the President's letter of 
July 18 changed the situation entirely, but 
added, "I am quite sure the mistake was not 
originally the President's, but that of some 
one or more of the gentlemen who are paid 
$8,000 a year from the Treasury for giving 
him bad advice; and from certain earmarks 
I infer that it had its initial impulse from the 
War Department." 

Lincoln, in his kindness of heart toward 
Greeley, proposed to the latter that, in view 
of the probable necessity of publishing their 
correspondence, parts of Greeley's letters, in- 
cluding those referring to the probable polit- 
ical advantage of the peace negotiations, be 
omitted, and invited him to Washington for a 
personal discussion. This invitation Greeley 
declined, and in his reply to a second one he 
said: 

"I fear that my chance for usefulness has 
208 



During the Civil War 

passed. I know that nine-tenths of the whole 
American people, North and South, are anx- 
ious for peace — peace on almost any terms 
— and utterly sick of human slaughter and 
devastation. I know that, to the general eye, 
it now seems that the rebels are anxious to 
negotiate, and that we repulse their advances. 
I know that if this impression be not re- 
moved we shall be beaten out of sight next 
November. I firmly believe that, were the 
election to take place to-morrow, the Demo- 
cratic majority in this State and Pennsylva- 
nia would amount to 100,000, and that we 
should lose Connecticut also.^ Now, if the 
rebellion can be crushed before November, it 
will do to go on; if not, we are rushing on 
certain ruin. 

"What, then, can I do in Washington? 
Your trusted advisers nearly all think I 
ought to go to Fort Lafayette for what I have 
done already. Seward wanted me sent there 
for my brief conference with M. Mercier. 
The cry had steadily been, No truce! No ar- 
mistice ! No negotiation ! No mediation ! Noth- 
ing but surrender at discretion! I never 
heard of such fatuity before. There is noth- 

* Pennsylvania gave Lincoln 20,075 majority the following 
November, Connecticut gave him 2,406, and New York gave 
Seymour onlv 6,749. 

15 209 



Horace Greeley 



ing like it in history. It must result in dis- 
aster, or all experience is delusive. . . . 

"In case peace can not now be made, con- 
sent to an armistice for 07ie year, each party 
to retain, unmolested, all it now holds, but 
the rebel ports to be open. Meantime, let a 
national convention be held, and there will 
surely be no war, at all events." 

Greeley, in closing this correspondence, 
insisted that all or none of it should be pub- 
lished. "This was accepted by Mr. Lincoln," 
say his biographers, "as a veto upon its pub- 
lication. He could not afford, for the sake 
of vindicating his own action, to reveal to the 
country the despondency — one might almost 
say the desperation — of one so prominent in 
Eepublican circles as the editor of the Trib- 
une." The correspondence did not appear 
until Messrs. Nicolay and Hay laid it before 
their readers in 1890. 

One illustration of Greeley's feeling to- 
ward Lincoln remains to be cited. On the 
day that Lincoln was shot Greeley had writ- 
ten an editorial, "a brutal, bitter, sarcastic 
personal attack " on the President. When the 
proof of this article reached the hands of the 
managing editor, Sidney Howard Gay, in the 
evening, Mr. Lincoln was dying from his 
wound. Gay suppressed the editorial, telling 
210 



During the Civil War 

the foreman to lock up the type and tell no 
one of its existence. The next day, when 
Greeley found that the article was not in the 
paper, he accosted Gay in a rage, saying, 
"They tell me you ordered my leader out of 
this morning's paper. Is it your paper or 
mine? I should like to know if I can not 
print what I choose in my own paper." Gay 
replied that the article was still in type, and 
could be used, but added: "Only this, Mr. 
Greeley. I know New York, and I hope and 
believe before God that there is so much vir- 
tue in New York that, if I had let that article 
go into this morning's paper, there would not 
be one brick upon another in the Tribune 
ofRce now." Greeley never alluded to the sub- 
ject again.^ 

The following statement has recently been 
printed: "It was known to but few persons at 
the time — and those then connected with the 
New York Tribune — that President Lincoln 
paid a visit to Horace Greeley, at the Trib- 
une office, of a most sacred nature and pre- 
sumably of a most urgent and important 
character, somewhere about the time of the 
accession of Grant to the office of command- 
er-in-chief of the army, arriving in the even- 

' Hale's Lowell and his Friends, pp. 178, 179. 

211 



Horace Greeley 



ing and leaving for the capital early in the 
morning, with few but themselves cognizant 
of the fact. The important events around 
Petersburg and Richmond followed shortly 
afterward, and those events were probably 
the subject of their conference." This story 
is inherently improbable, and I have the most 
competent authority for saying that it be- 
longs in the list of romances which include 
another recently published story that Lincoln 
once went secretly to pass a night in prayer 
with Henry Ward Beecher. 

Greeley furnished his own comment on his 
estimate and treatment of Lincoln during the 
period of the war. One of his best pieces of 
literary work is an address on Lincoln, which 
he wrote in 1868. In this he reviewed Lin- 
coln's entire career, pointing out mistakes 
with which he credited him, and summing up 
his estimate of the man in these words: 

"Never before did one so constantly and 
visibly grow under the discipline of incessant 
cares, anxieties, and trials. The Lincoln of 
'62 was plainly a larger, broader, better man 
than he had been in '61; while '63 and '64 
worked his continued and unabated growth in 
mental and moral stature. Few have been 
more receptive, more sympathetic, and (with- 
in reasonable limits) more plastic than he. 
212 



During the Civil War 

Had he lived twenty years longer, I believe 
he would have steadily increased in ability to 
counsel his countrymen, and in the estimation 
of the wise and good. . . . 

"The republic needed to be cast through 
chastening, purifying fires of adversity and 
suffering; so these came and did their work, 
and the verdure of a new national life springs 
greenly from their ashes. Other men were 
helpful to the great renervation, and nobly 
did their part in it ; yet, looking back through 
the lifting mists of seven eventful, tragic, try- 
ing, glorious years, I clearly discern that the 
one providential leader, the indispensable 
hero of the great drama — faithfully reflect- 
ing even in his hesitations and seeming vacil- 
lation the sentiment of the masses — fitted by 
his very defects and shortcomings for the 
burden laid upon him, the good to be wrought 
out through him, was Abraham Lincoln." 



213 



CHAPTER IX 

GEEELEY's presidential campaign — HIS DEATH 

On the evening of March 4, 1869, John 
Russell Young, the managing editor of the 
Tribune, came to my desk (I was then the 
assistant city editor), with a long letter, writ- 
ten on Tribune notepaper, in his fine hand, 
which he asked me to copy for him. The let- 
ter was addressed to General Grant's inti- 
mate friend, General Adam Badeau. The 
next morning I found this letter, with only 
the necessary alterations, printed as- the 
Tribune's leading editorial, giving an outline 
of what the paper hoped for Grant's admin- 
istration. There were to be economy and re- 
trenchment; Cuba seemed to be "falling into 
our lap for nothing " ; Santo Domingo stood 
at our door, and with it would come Porto 
Rico ; for Canada we could wait ; Grant was 
to change possible national bankruptcy into 
solvency, bring about specie payments, and 
send ships carrying the American flag into 
every sea — in a word, to have a "splendid 
214 



Greeley's Presidential Campaign 

administration." At the close of the Presi- 
dent's first term, the editor of the Tribune 
was the candidate who was opposing him for 
reelection, and on a platform which was pre- 
ceded by an address accusing the Grant ad- 
ministration of usurpation of power, and of 
striking a blow at the fundamental principles 
of constitutional government and the liberties 
of the people; charging the President with 
the use of his high powers for the promotion 
of personal ends, making the public service 
"a machinery of corruption," and alleging 
that his partizans had "kept alive the pas- 
sions and resentments of the late civil war, 
to use them for their own advantage." 

In explaining this changed position, it is 
necessary to glance back at the causes of Re- 
publican discontent, and to review Greeley's 
position on the question of reconstruction. 

General Grant naturally carried his mili- 
tary ideas into the White House. He was not 
tactful in conciliating those who disagreed 
with him about his civil policy, and was stub- 
born in supporting men whom he had selected 
for office when they came under a fire of ad- 
verse criticism. Some of his advisers early 
encountered such criticism, and serious scan- 
dals were brought to light in the Post-Office 
and other departments. Many Republicans 
215 



Horace Greeley 



came to believe that the President was per- 
sonally corrupt, and that his fidelity to 
friends "under fire " was due to his own con- 
nection with their schemes. His civil ap- 
pointments were often very injudicious, and 
there grew up a large body of independents 
ready to accept the declaration of the Nation 
that the President had so used his power of 
appointment that there was in office "a body 
of officials such as no party in a constitutional 
country has ever been served by, and such as 
no government except that of imperial 
France has ever brought into play to in- 
fluence an election." 

Both among and outside of the radical 
civil service and revenue reformers were 
many men in the North who were anxious 
to see the negro question eliminated from 
Federal politics. The disfranchisement of 
the leading white men in the Southern States 
who had participated in the rebellion had 
handed over the governments of many of 
these States to the ignorant negroes, and to 
newcomers from the North, who were soon 
classified under the name of " carpetbag- 
gers," and an era of governmental chaos en- 
sued, out of which came scandalous waste of 
the public funds, the grossest travesties in the 
way of legislatures, and the organization of 
216 



Greeley's Presidential Campaign 

the whites in "Kuklux Klans," which, as is al- 
ways the case in such organizations formed 
outside of the law, committed terrible out- 
rages in their efforts to check existing evils. 
A motion in the House of Representatives, in 
June, 1870, to remove all political disabilities 
for participation in the rebellion was lost, 59 
to 112, 11 Republicans voting with the mi- 
nority. President Grant, in his message in 
1871, said: "It may be considered whether it 
is not now time that the disabilities imposed 
by the Fourteenth Amendment be removed." 
On a motion in the House by Mr. Dawes, on 
January 15, 1872, to remove all the disabil- 
ities named in this amendment, the vote was, 
yeas, 132; nays, 70; not two-thirds, as was 
necessary to pass the resolution, Dawes, Gar- 
field, and Hale voting with the yeas. 

While Greeley was not identified person- 
ally with the civil service reformers, he was 
the leader of those Republicans who demand- 
ed an end of all proscription for participation 
in the rebellion. With the laying down of the 
rebel arms he had lifted up his voice for mag- 
nanimity toward the South. The day after 
Lee's surrender the Tribune said (May 10, 
1865) : "We can not believe it wise or well 
to take the life of any man who shall have 
submitted to the national authority," explain- 
217 



Horace Greeley 



ing, "Unquestionably, tliere are men in the 
South who have richly deserved condign pun- 
ishment. Whoever is responsible for the 
butchery of our black soldiers vanquished in 
fight, or the still more atrocious murder of 
captives by wanton exposure in prison- 
camps, stands in this category. But the im- 
mediate issue concerns, not the dispensation 
of justice to individuals, but the pacification 
of the whole republic." 

On November 27, 1866, when a hopeful 
candidate for United States Senator, Gree- 
ley, with the knowledge that the declaration 
would destroy his chances of election, said in 
the Tribune: "I am for universal amnesty — 
so far as immunity from fear of punishment 
or confiscation is concerned — even though im- 
partial suif rage should for the present be re- 
sisted and defeated. I did think it desirable 
that Jefferson Davis should be arraigned and 
tried for treason; and it still seems to me 
that this might properly have been done 
many months ago. But it was not done then, 
and now I believe it would result in far more 
evil than good. I hope to see impartial suf- 
frage established by very general consent. 
. . . The one simple, obvious mode of taking 
the negro out of politics is to treat him as a 
man." 

218 



Greeley's Presidential Campaign 

Greeley visited Washington by invitation 
after the elections of 1865, and took part in 
conferences with President Johnson, the ob- 
ject of which was to secure cooperation and 
peace between him and Congress. These ef- 
forts failed ; the President issued a proclama- 
tion of amnesty, excepting fourteen classes, 
including generally all persons who had taken 
official part in the rebellion, and by procla- 
mation he established governments in several 
of the lately rebellious States ; and on April 
2, 1866, he officially proclaimed the rebellion 
at an end. Congress met, and appointed a 
joint committee to report on the existing con- 
dition of the rebelling States, and the con- 
flict between the President and the Federal 
Legislature ensued, the President vetoing the 
reconstruction measures which Congress 
passed during that conflict. Greeley was a 
bitter opponent of President Johnson's pol- 
icy. He called his veto of the bill establishing 
universal suffrage in the District of Colum- 
bia "the least plausible veto message we ever 
read" ; said of the veto of the reconstruction 
bill (March 3, 1867) : "Its obvious tendency 
to keep the Southern States unreconstructed 
and unrepresented is, in every view, deplor- 
able " ; and, during the impeachment trial, de- 
clared, "The nation demands impeachment." 
219 



Horace Greeley 



The reconstruction acts excluded from a 
share in the new State governments all per- 
sons already disfranchised for participation 
in the rebellion ; an amendment offered in the 
House by Mr. Blaine, that the rebel States 
should be entitled to representation in Con- 
gress whenever the Fourteenth Amendment 
to the Constitution should be ratified, and 
they should consent to it, was defeated, 69 
to 94. Greeley in a speech in Richmond, Va., 
in May, 1867, stated that he accepted this pro- 
scription "only as a precaution against pres- 
ent disloyalty," adding: "I believe the nation 
will insist on such proscription being re- 
moved so soon as reasonable and proper as- 
surances are given that disloyalty has ceased 
to be powerful and dangerous in the South- 
ern States." 

When Jefferson Davis's counsel, George 
Shea, an old friend of Greeley, consulted the 
latter about procuring satisfactory bondsmen 
for his client, Greeley suggested two promi- 
nent Union men, and added, "If my name 
should be found necessary, you may use 
that." His name was asked for, and he went 
to Richmond, and there, in May, 1867, signed 
the bond with Gerritt Smith, Commodore 
Vanderbilt, and others. This act brought 
down on him such an avalanche of denuncia- 
220 



Greeley's Presidential Campaign 

tion from Ms party and personal admirers as 
he had never incurred. His motives were at- 
tacked, his interview with Davis misrepre- 
sented, and he was handed over by thousands 
of Repubhcans to the company of the late 
rebels. An indication of the public feeling 
was furnished by its effect on the sale of his 
history of the rebellion. In his own words, 
that sale then "almost ceased for a season; 
thousands who had subscribed for it refusing 
to take their copies." But, he added, "at all 
events, the public has learned that I act upon 
my convictions without fear of personal con- 
sequences." 

The feeling against Greeley in New York 
city manifested itself most pointedly in a call, 
signed by more than thirty members, for a 
special meeting of the Union League Club, to 
consider his conduct in becoming Davis's 
bondsman. In reply to an official notification 
of this meeting, Greeley wrote to the signers 
of the call a vigorous letter, in which he re- 
hearsed his early views about the disposition 
to be made of Davis, recalled the fact that, 
soon after their publication, the acceptance 
of a portrait of him by the club had been op- 
posed by its president, and added: 

"Gentlemen, I shall not attend your meet- 
ing this evening. I have an engagement out 
221 



Horace Greeley 



of town, and shall keep it. I do not recognize 
you as capable of judging, or fully appre- 
hending, me. You evidently regard me as a 
weak sentimentalist, misled by a maudling 
philosophy. I arraign you as narrow-minded 
blockheads, who would like to be useful to a 
great and good cause, but don't know how. 
Your attempt to base a great, enduring party 
on the hate and wrath necessarily engen- 
dered by a bloody civil war, is as though you 
should plant a colony on an iceberg which had 
somehow drifted into a tropical ocean. I tell 
you here, that, out of a life earnestly devoted 
to the good of human kind, your children will 
select my going to Richmond and signing that 
bail bond as the wisest act, and will feel that 
it did more for freedom and humanity than 
all of you were competent to do, though you 
had lived to the age of Methuselah. I ask 
nothing of you, then, but that you proceed to 
your end by a direct, frank, manly way. 
Don't sidle off into a mild resolution of cen- 
sure, but move the expulsion which you pro- 
pose, and which I deserve, if I deserve any 
reproach whatever. All I care for is that 
you make this a square, stand-up fight, and 
record your judgment by yeas and nays." 

The club, at its meeting, adopted a reso- 
lution setting forth that there was nothing in 
222 



Greeley's Presidential Campaign 

Greeley's action "calling for proceedings of 
this club." 

While Greeley was in Eichmond he ac- 
cepted an invitation to deliver an address in 
the African Church, in which he made an 
earnest plea for good-will and reconciliation. 
He pointed out objections to some of the laws 
passed by the Southern State governments 
established under military rule — such as the 
prohibition against negroes bearing arms or 
testifying against whites in the courts — call- 
ing them "unnecessary, invidious, and degra- 
ding." Urging the obligation of the South as 
well as the North to the blacks, he said: 
"Their equal rights as citizens are to be se- 
cured now or not at all. I insist, then, in 
the name of justice and humanity, in the 
name of our country, and of every righteous 
interest and section of that country, that the 
rights of all the American people — native or 
naturalized, born such or made such — shall 
be guaranteed in the State Constitutions first, 
and in the Federal Constitution as soon as 
possible ; that we make it a fundamental con- 
dition of American law and policy that every 
citizen shall have, in the eye of the law, every 
right of every other citizen. I would make 
the equal rights of the colored people of the 
country, under the laws and the Constitution 
223 



Horace Greeley 



thereof, the corner-stone of a true, beneficent 
reconstruction." As to the removal of dis- 
abilities in the South, he would deny the right 
to a voice in the Government to the "implaca- 
bly hostile," but he would look to the removal 
of all proscription at the earliest possible mo- 
ment. He closed thus : 

"Men of Virginia: I entreat you to forget 
the years of slavery and secession and civil 
war, now happily passed, in the hopeful con- 
templation of better days of freedom and 
union and peace now opening before you. 
Forget that some of you have been masters, 
others slaves — some for disunion, others 
against it — and remember only that you are 
Virginians, and all now and henceforth free- 
men. Bear in mind that your State is the 
heart of a great republic, not the frontier of 
a weaker Confederacy, and that your un- 
equaled combination of soil, timber, minerals, 
and water-power fairly entitles you to a pop- 
ulation of five millions before the close of this 
century. Consider that the natural highway 
of empire — the shortest and easiest route 
from the Atlantic to the heart of the great 
valley — lies up the James River and down the 
Kanawha, and that this city, with its mill- 
power superior to any in our country but that 
of St. Anthony's Falls on the Mississippi, 
224 







™ SI m ni 3- ^' ^B*"-* 




- >^< 



Greeley's Presidential Campaign 

ought to insure you a speedy development 
of manufactures surpassing any Lowell or 
Lawrence, with a population of at least half 
a million before the close of this century.^ 
I exhort you, then. Republicans and Conserv- 
atives, whites and blacks, to bury the dead 
past in mutual and hearty good-will, and in 
a general, united effort to promote the pros- 
perity and exalt the glory of our long dis- 
tracted and bleeding, but henceforth reunited, 
magnificent country." 

In May, 1871, Greeley accepted an invita- 
tion to address the Texas State Fair at Hous- 
ton, and made a number of speeches in the 
South on his way to that city. On his return, 
a public welcome was given to him by his 
admirers at the Lincoln Club in New York 
city, on which occasion he made an elaborate 
address, urging once more universal amnes- 
ty. He said he believed that the leading men 
of the South would be safer and more useful 
in Congress than the second-rate men, and 
that the Republican party would be stronger 
0/ if the Tombses, Wises, and Wade Hamptons 

' Greeley was not a good prophet. The population of Vir- 
ginia in 1900 was 1,854,184, and of Richmond 85,050. In his 
autobiography he said, " I predict that California will have 
3,000.000 of people in 1900 and Oregon at least 1,000,000." The 
population of California in 1900 was 1,485,053, and of Oregon 
413,536. 

16 225 



Horace Greeley 



had been allowed to go to Congress four 
years before. Admitting that dishonest "car- 
petbaggers " were "a mournful fact," he ex- 
plained : "Do not mistake me. All the North- 
ern men in the South are not thieves. The 
larger part of them are honest and good men. 
. . . The time has been, and still is, when it 
was perilous to be known as a Republican 
or an Abolitionist in the South; but it never 
called the blush of shame to any man's cheek 
to be called so until those thieving carpet- 
baggers went there — never ! . . . ' Well, then, 
do you justify the Kuklux? ' I am asked. Jus- 
tify them in what? If they should choose to 
catch a hundred or two of these thieves, place 
them tenderly across rails, and bear them 
quietly and peacefully across the Ohio, I 
should, of course, condemn the act, as I con- 
demn all acts of violence; but the tears live 
in a very small onion that would water all 
my sorrow for them." He closed with a plea 
for an end of fighting over old issues. 

These outspoken expressions made Gree- 
ley — leading Republican and editor as he was 
— the acknowledged representative of the 
supporters of universal amnesty. 

In no border State had the loyal and rebel 
elements contended more bitterly during the 
war than in Missouri. When the State Con- 
226 



Greeley's Presidential Campaign 

stitution was revised in 1865, the new instru- 
ment disfranchised the sympathizers with the 
Confederates, and required a rigorous test 
oath, which was upheld by the United States 
Supreme Court. In December, 1866, B. Gratz 
Brown, an ex-United States Senator, took the 
lead in a movement for universal amnesty 
and universal suffrage in the State, and he 
was warmly supported by Carl Schurz,^ who 
went to St. Louis in 1867 to edit a German 
newspaper, and was elected a United States 
Senator in 1869. The Missouri Legislature 
of 1870 voted to submit to the people six 
amendments to the Constitution, which gave 
the right of suffrage to every male citizen of 
the United States, and abolished the test 
oath, and the oath of loyalty required of 
jurors. The Democrats — a hopeless minority 
— held no State convention that year. The 
Eepublican convention, by a vote of 439 to 
342, adopted, instead of the report of the 
majority of the committee on resolutions 
(presented by its chairman. Senator Schurz) 

' Schurz, who was a vice-president of the National Repub- 
lican Convention of 1868, moved an amendment to the plat- 
form, which was adopted, declaring in favor of " the removal 
of the disqualifications and restrictions imposed upon the late 
rebels in the same measure as the spirit of disloyalty will die 
out, and as may be consistent with the safety of the loyal 
people." 

227 



Horace Greeley 



which favored the removal of all disqualifi- 
cations and the conferring of equal political 
rights and privileges on all classes, a minor- 
ity report "in favor of reenfranchising those 
justly disfranchised for participation in the 
late rebellion as soon as it can be done with 
safety to the State." Thereupon nearly two 
hundred and fifty delegates, headed by 
Schurz, left the convention. The majority 
adopted a resolution heartily approving the 
administration of President Grant, and nomi- 
nated a State ticket. The bolters, with 
Schurz in the chair, also nominated a State 
ticket, headed by B. Gratz Brown for Gov- 
ernor. President Grant sided with the Radi- 
cals, and in a letter to a Federal office-holder 
in St. Louis, in September, said, "I regard 
the movement headed by Carl Schurz, Brown, 
etc., as similar to the Tennessee and Virginia 
movements, intended to carry a portion of the 
Republican party over to the Democracy, and 
thus give them control." ^ Brown was elected 
Governor by 41,917 majority. 

The Central Committee of the Missouri 

' A report, current at the time, and ■which has found a 
place in some permanent records, that President Grant refused 
to receive Senator Schurz when he called at the White House, 
was without foundation, as I am able to say on the authority 
of Mr. Schurz himself. 

228 



Greeley's Presidential Campaign 

Liberal Republicans adopted a resolution in 
1871 declaring that no citizen should be de- 
prived of a just share in the Government; de- 
manding the removal of all political disabili- 
ties; saying that the organization was un- 
equivocally hostile to any tariff which fosters 
one industry or interest at the expense of 
another; and calling for a thorough reform 
of the civil service. The resolution also de- 
clared that "this committee, believing that it 
has no power to disband or consolidate with 
any other committee, expresses its willing- 
ness to call a State convention of Liberal Re- 
publicans to take into consideration measures 
for the unity of the party." As an outcome 
of this action of the committee a call was is- 
sued for a State convention of Liberal Re- 
publicans, which was held in Jefferson City 
on January 24, 1872, with a representation 
from nearly every county. This convention, 
in turn, issued a call for a national conven- 
tion, to be held in Cincinnati, on the first 
Monday in May next, "to take such action 
as their convictions of duty and public exi- 
gencies may require." The platform adopted 
declared for universal amnesty and equal 
suffrage, tariff reform "by the removal of 
such duties as, in addition to the yielded reve- 
nue, increase the price of domestic products 
229 



Horace Greeley 



for the benefit of favored interests," and civil 
service reform, and denounced the "packing 
of the Supreme Court to relieve rich corpora- 
tions," and the attempt to cure the Kuklux 
disorders, irreligion, or intemperance "by 
means of unconstitutional laws." 

This movement for a national convention 
received some directions from Washington. 
Schurz was occupying his seat as Senator at 
the time, and he held intimate relations with 
Charles Sumner, whose quarrel with Presi- 
dent Grant was a matter of national interest. 
The unfriendliness of the Massachusetts Sen- 
ator and the President, beginning, perhaps, 
when Sumner was obliged, on constitutional 
grounds, to oppose the confirmation of A. T. 
Stewart, Grant's first nominee for Secretary 
of the Treasury, grew into charges and 
countercharges of great bitterness while the 
Santo Domingo treaty was under discus- 
sion, and the President gave Sumner the 
chief credit for the defeat of that measure. 
Motley's recall from England was the Presi- 
dent's first act of retaliation. In the fol- 
lowing December the President proposed the 
annexation of Santo Domingo in the same 
way that Texas had been annexed as a State, 
and Sumner again led the opposition, select- 
ing words that were especially irritating to 
230 



Greeley's Presidential Campaign 

the executive, and charging him with trying 
to remove three antitreaty members of the 
Committee on Foreign Relations. The publi- 
cation of the Motley correspondence, in Jan- 
uary, 1871, put an end to all cooperation be- 
tween the State Department and the Commit- 
tee on Foreign Relations. The Alabama High 
Joint Commission began its sessions in 
Washington in February, and in March, 
when the new Congress met, the Senate com- 
mittee was reorganized, and, in accordance 
with the President's wishes, Sumner was 
dropped as chairman. 

From that time Sumner was an out- 
spoken opponent of Grant's renomination, 
and so bitter a critic that he was persuaded 
by his friends to withhold from publica- 
tion an arraignment of Grant which he pre- 
pared; he circulated it privately, however. 
Early in 1871 he offered in the Senate a reso- 
lution to amend the Federal Constitution so 
that a President could serve but a single term, 
and he and others who objected to Grant's 
reelection discussed the steps necessary to 
defeat him, and had a share in shaping the 
Missouri movement. After the nomination 
of the Greeley ticket, and a few days before 
Grant's renomination, Sumner made a bitter 
speech in the Senate, of which he said, as he 
231 



Horace Greeley 



left the Capitol, "I have to-day made the 
renomination of Grant impossible," and 
throughout the campaign he refused to be- 
lieve that the Grant ticket would win.^ 

In 1871 and 1872 the tariff question was 
causing the Republicans a great deal of anx- 
iety. So firm a defender of protection as 
Senator Morrill had declared in 1870 that "it 
is a mistake for the friends of a sound tariff 
to insist on the extreme rates imposed during 
the war, if less will raise the necessary reve- 
nue." A bill prepared by David A. Wells, 
Special Commissioner of the Revenue, in 
1867, reducing duties on raw material, had 
passed the Senate by a large majority, and 
received a vote of 106 to 64 in its favor in 
the House, but failed there because a two- 
thirds majority was necessary to reach it un- 
der a suspension of the rules. The subject 
came up again in 1870, when Garfield, in the 
House, warned his protectionist friends that, 
unless they revised the tariff "prudently and 
wisely " they would have to submit to a re- 
duction that would "shock, if not shatter, all 
our protected industries." Congress in that 
year passed a tariff bill, but it did not satisfy 

' I am assured on the most competent authority that the 
published statement that Sumner expected that he would be 
nominated for President at Cincinnati is unfounded. 

232 



Greeley's Presidential Campaign 

the revenue reformers, since, while reducing 
the duty on pig iron from $9 to $7 a ton, it 
increased the duty on steel rails, nickel, flax, 
and marble. 

The removal of Mr. Wells from his of- 
fice was accepted as an affront both to 
tariff reform and to civil service reform. The 
urgency of the demand for relief from tariff 
burdens was shown by a letter from a Re- 
publican observer in Washington, printed in 
the Tribune in March, 1871, advocating "a 
carefully revised tariff bill " so wisely drawn 
"that it will permit the party to escape a 
split on this question in the coming presi- 
dential campaign." Hubbard, of New Hamp- 
shire, on March 27, 1871, moved in the House 
that the tariff should be so reformed as to be 
"a tax for revenue only, and not for the pro- 
tection of class interests at the general ex- 
pense." A motion to table this resolution 
was defeated by a vote of 2 yeas to 154 nays, 
and it was referred to the Ways and Means 
Committee. The House, at this session, 
passed a bill placing salt and coal on the free 
list, and to these, at the instance of the Penn- 
sylvanians, added tea and coffee; but these 
measures did not pass the Senate. 

Thus it will be seen that the tariff declara- 
tion of the Missouri Liberal Republicans ap- 
233 



Horace Greeley 



pealed to the sympathies of a large number 
of other Republicans. 

The Tribune of March 30, 1872, published 
a letter signed by several New York Republic- 
ans, addressed to the chairman of the execu- 
tive committee of the Liberal Republicans of 
Missouri, expressing their concurrence in the 
principles set forth by the Jefferson City 
convention, which, as regards the tariff, they 
interpreted to mean that "Federal taxes 
should be imposed for revenue, and should 
be so adjusted as to make the burden upon 
the industries of the country as light as pos- 
sible," hoping that the movement begun there 
would spread through all the States, and in- 
viting all Republicans of New York who 
agreed with them to cooperate. Greeley was 
the second signer of this letter. The Tribune 
had said, on March 16, "Of course, we shall 
ask to be counted out [of the Liberal move- 
ment] if the majority shall decide to make 
free trade a plank in their platform," and 
it explained on April 4, "In signing the 
letter to Colonel Grosvenor, we simply indi- 
cated our approval of the Cincinnati move- 
ment, not of every phase embodied in that 
letter." 

The Liberal movement received encour- 
agement in all the States, and on May 1 six 
234 



Greeley's Presidential Campaign 

hundred and fourteen delegates assembled in 
convention in Cincinnati. Meeting as they 
did without previous organization, they were 
largely at sea both as regards the form of 
the platform and the candidate. Charles 
Francis Adams was the preference of the 
radical civil service and tariff reformers. 
Illinois was divided between Senator Trum- 
bull and Judge David Davis, of the United 
States Supreme Court.^ Governor Brown 
was the favorite of most of the Missouri dele- 
gates, and Pennsylvania was ready to vote 
for Curtin. Horace Greeley was supported 
by sixty-six of the sixty-eight New York dele- 
gates. How to nominate him on a platform 
in line with the declarations of the Jefferson 
City platform was a problem even to his 
friends. The Missourians held that Brown 
was the logical leader of a movement which, 
they said, originated in his State and had 
made him Governor. 

In their earlier despatches, as the dele- 
gates were gathering, neither the Sun nor the 
Times correspondent considered Greeley's 

* A Labor Reform National Convention, at Columbus, Ohio, 
on February 21 (twelve States being represented), had nomi- 
nated Judge Davis for President. He declined the nomination 
on June 28 on the ground that he had consented to the use of 
his name in the Liberal Republican Convention. 

235 



Horace Greeley 



nomination a possibility, and both made pre- 
dictions of the disposition of his vote after 
the first "complimentary " ballot. E. L. God- 
kin, in his letter to the Nation reviewing 
the convention (which he attended), said: 
"Strange as it may seem, Greeley's nomina- 
tion was generally regarded as impossible. 
I think I am right in saying that nobody out- 
side the circle of his immediate supporters 
treated it as a serious probability. Men 
laughed when his name was spoken of; all 
said he ought to have a good complimentary 
vote; but nearly everybody talked of his se- 
lection for the presidency by the convention 
as an utterly ludicrous thing, which would 
cover the proceedings with ridicule and con- 
tempt. What was feared by the reformers 
was not this, but some ' sinful game ' on the 
part of the politicians which would defeat 
Adams and deprive the movement of all 
weight and significance." 

To Adams objection was made that he had 
not been identified with the Liberal move- 
ment; that he was "cold-blooded," and would 
arouse no enthusiasm in the West, and that 
his relations with Sumner would drive the 
latter back to Grant if Adams was nomi- 
nated. That Adams was not a "practical pol- 
itician " was shown by the publication, on 
236 



Greeley's Presidential Campaign 

April 25, of a letter addressed by Mm to 
David A. Wells, in which he said : 

"I do not want the nomination, and could 
only be induced to consider it by the circum- 
stances under which it might possibly be 
made. If the call upon me were an unequiv- 
ocal one, based upon confidence in my char- 
acter, earned in public life, and a belief that 
I would carry out in practise the principles 
that I professed, then indeed would come a 
test of my courage in an emergency ; but if I 
am to be negotiated for, and have assurances 
given that I am honest, you will be so kind 
as to withdraw me out of that crowd. ... If 
the good people who meet at Cincinnati sin- 
cerely believe that they need such an anoma- 
lous being as I am (which I do not), they 
must express it in a manner to convince me 
of it, or all their labor will be thrown away." 

The Tribune was quick to make use of 
this letter. Its Cincinnati despatch the next 
day said that it had created a flutter; "the 
Missouri and Kansas delegates say it ruins 
his [Adams's] prospects for the nomination 
here." Its despatch dated April 26 said that, 
according to a leading Pennsylvanian, the 
delegation from that State indicated a will- 
ingness to sustain Greeley, "whose presence 
on the ticket should be a guaranty to the 
237 



Horace Greeley 



country of the dignity and power of the re- 
form movement ; he would, they argue, carry 
an overwhelming Eepublican vote, and ren- 
der the work of the Philadelphia gathering 
[the National Republican Convention] use- 
less. They are equally frank in their repug- 
nance to Charles Francis Adams, whose let- 
ter is regarded as frivolous and undignified. 
He is accused of courting administration 
bounty by his careless, or as they term it, 
slighting allusion to the Liberal convention. 
It is claimed that Adams has lost the chance 
he had last week, through the earnest sym- 
pathy and support extended to him by the 
World and August Belmont." On April 28 
its correspondent telegraphed, "The loudest 
talking is for Davis, the strongest for Ad- 
ams, the most boastful for Brown, while the 
friends of Trumbull and Cox counsel quiet- 
ly." The next day its advices from the same 
source were, "There is much talk about Hor- 
ace Greeley, but his friends are not making 
any vehement contest for him. Their policy, 
so far as they can be said to have one, ap- 
pears to be that of awaiting events ; they be- 
lieve their favorite to be the second choice, 
in a large measure, of both the Adams and 
Davis men." Editorially, at the same time, 
the Tribune said: "The Tribune has no can- 
238 



Greeley's Presidential Campaign 

didate; it asks for no particular man; but it 
does ask the choice of some man whose name 
should symbolize the national movement for 
reform." 

The position of Illinois in the convention 
was an important one. It was represented 
by forty-two delegates, and the supporters of 
Trumbull and Davis were stubbornly antag- 
onistic. The anti-Adams feeling among some 
of these delegates was very strong, and they 
were quoted as saying, after the publication 
of his letter to Wells, that Grant would carry 
their State against Adams by 50,000 major- 
ity. As events proved, this feeling caused 
Adams's defeat. 

The convention organized with Senator 
Schurz in the chair. Two days were devoted 
to preliminary matters, and on Friday, May 
3, the platform was adopted and the ballot- 
ing for candidates took place. The platform, 
reported by Horace White, editor of the Chi- 
cago Tribune, opened with an address char- 
ging the Grant administration with corrup- 
tion, and the President with using his official 
position for personal ends, keeping corrupt 
men in public places, and being unequal to 
the duties of his office, and declaring that a 
party "thus led and controlled can no longer 
be of service to the best interests of the re- 
239 



Horace Greeley 



public." The resolutions demanded the im- 
mediate removal of all disabilities imposed 
for participation in the rebellion, a thorough 
reform of the civil service, the maintenance 
of the public credit and a speedy return to 
specie payments, and opposed further land- 
grants to railroads. On the question of the 
tariff it declared as follows: 

"Seventh. We demand a system of Fed- 
eral taxation which shall not unnecessarily 
interfere with the industries of the people, 
and which shall provide the means necessary 
to pay the expenses of the Government, eco- 
nomically administered, the pensions, the in- 
terest on the public debt, and a moderate 
annual reduction of the principal thereof; 
and, recognizing that there are in our midst 
honest but irreconcilable differences of opin- 
ion with regard to the respective systems of 
protection and free trade, we remit the dis- 
cussion of the subject to the people in their 
Congressional districts, and to the decision 
of Congress thereon, wholly free from execu- 
tive interference or dictation." 

The delegates were still "at sea" as re- 
gards the head of their ticket. On the pre- 
ceding night the New York Times corre- 
spondent, who the day before had insisted 
240 



Greeley's Presidential Campaign 

that Greeley stood no chance of the nomina- 
tion, reported no change, except that Greeley 
and Trumbull were "a little stronger"; and 
the Sun correspondent noted a belief that 
Adams was the coming man. The most influ- 
ential Adams men thought that he would be 
nominated without difficulty. 

On Thursday morning it was rumored in 
convention circles that B. Gratz Brown and 
Frank Blair were on their way to Cincinnati, 
and they arrived that evening. It had been 
stated from the time the delegates began to 
arrive that Brown would not attend the con- 
vention, and different reasons have been as- 
signed for his change of purpose. One 
writer ^ found his motive in jealousy of the 
growing influence of Schurz in the Liberal 
ranks, indicated by the selection of the Mis- 
souri Senator for chairman of the conven- 
tion. But Schurz was already a member of 
the upper house of Congress, and, as a for- 
eign-born citizen, could not receive the nomi- 
nation for President. Moreover, Brown 
could easily have ascertained that Schurz ad- 
vised against his own selection as chairman, 
both because he thought he could be more 
useful on the floor, and because it was his 

* Cincinnati correspondence of the Nation of May 9, 1872. 

17 241 



Horace Greeley 



opinion that a native-bom Eepublican should 
preside; and that he consented to take the 
place only when assured that, if he did not, 
it would go to a man who was radically ob- 
jectionable to the entire intelligent reform 
sentiment of the movement. The real ex- 
planation of the Blair-Brown scheme in favor 
of Greeley is rather to be sought in the long- 
time political enmity of the Blair and Adams 
families. 

When the balloting began, only vague ru- 
mors of the Brown program had reached a 
majority of the delegates, and very many of 
them were ignorant of the light in which it 
was regarded by their chairman. The first 
ballot resulted as follows: 



Greeley 147 

Adams 205 

Trumbull 110 

Davis 92i 



Brown 95 

Curtin 62 

Chase 2^ 



This vote aroused the enthusiasm of the 
Adams supporters, but evidence of the 
Brown-Greeley deal was supplied at once. 
As soon as the result was announced the 
chairman, reading from a slip of paper which 
he held in his hand, informed the convention 
that a gentleman who had just received a 
large number of votes desired to make a com- 
munication, and Governor Brown ascended 
242 



Greeley's Presidential Campaign 

the platform. In his remarks he not only 
stated his own withdrawal, but urged the 
nomination of Greeley. The Missouri dele- 
gation at once retired for consultation, dur- 
ing which Schurz made a vigorous plea 
against handing over to Greeley their vote. 
In the first ballot Missouri had given Brown 
30 votes and Trumbull 3. In the second 
ballot it gave Greeley 10, Trumbull 16, and 
Adams 4. In the fifth ballot it increased the 
vote for Greeley to 18, giving Trumbull 8 and 
Adams 4, and the total of this ballot gave 
Adams 309, and Greeley 258. Adams's sup- 
porters now counted on his nomination as a 
certainty on the next ballot, believing that 
the Trumbull vote (of 91) would be cast for 
him. 

The Illinois delegates were absent in con- 
ference when the sixth ballot was ordered, 
and the Greeley men began a noisy effort to 
start a stampede for their favorite. The dele- 
gates generally were in a nervous state, not 
understanding clearly how the wires were 
being pulled by the skilled manipulators, nor 
what the wishes of the most trusted leaders 
were; and had one of the latter taken the 
floor (as was suggested but not done), and 
moved the nomination of Adams by acclama- 
tion, there is little doubt that the convention 
243 



Horace Greeley 



would have so decreed. The Greeley sup- 
porters received unexpected aid when the 
vote of Illinois was announced, as it gave 
Greeley 14 and Adams only 27. This marked 
the beginning of the end. The Greeley hur- 
rah was kept up, votes were changed so rap- 
idly and amid so much confusion that the 
secretaries could not keep accurate register 
of them, and the chairman, unable to recog- 
nize any one, had to suggest that the changes 
be handed up in writing. When at last the 
announcement of the ballot was made, it gave 
Greeley 482 and Adams 187. Greeley was 
the nominee of the convention, with Brown 
for Vice-President. "When the call for a 
unanimous vote came," said the Tribune's re- 
port, "the element known as Free Trade and 
Kevenue Reform manifested a disposition to 
mar the enthusiasm by dogged silence, and 
an indignant and unanimous nay." 

When the country heard of this result, it 
taxed public credulity. Greeley's nomination 
by these tariff reformers and civil service re- 
formers seemed like an impossibility. At the 
Union League Club in New York city mem- 
bers individually predicted that the candi- 
date would decline the honor, but Greeley 
had no such intention. How could it seem to 
him otherwise than that the gratification of 
244 



Greeley's Presidential Campaign 

an ambition unsatisfied for years had come 
at last? Weed might consider him no politi- 
cian; Seward might overlook him in the ap- 
portionment of nominations and appoint- 
ments ; Lincoln might reject his advice. But 
now a great movement of the people in favor 
of that honest government and universal am- 
nesty for which he had so long been pleading, 
and on account of which he had made so seri- 
ous sacrifices, had called on him to be its 
leader. Never satisfied with the position and 
influence he had gained by means of his edi- 
torial pen, he now saw within his reach the 
great office which would bestow upon him an 
honor that would gratify his pride, and give 
him an opportunity to demonstrate those ad- 
ministrative qualities which he had been made 
to feel that others doubted. During the ses- 
sions of the convention he had been occupy- 
ing a room in a hotel near the Tribune office 
in order to be in close touch with the conven- 
tion. When the result of the final ballot was 
made known to him he received the news with 
a smiling countenance, and telegraphed at 
once, instructing his representatives in Cin- 
cinnati to tender to the convention his "grate- 
ful acknowledgment for the generous confi- 
dence " they had shown in him, adding, "I 
shall endeavor to deserve it." 
245 



Horace Greeley 



But tariff reform ! Greeley was ready to 
accept the platform. To a reporter who 
asked him that evening, "If the people elect 
a majority of Congressmen in favor of a 
repeal of the tariff bill, and Congress 
repeals that bill, what would be the duty 
of the next President of the United States ! " 
Greeley replied, "It would be his duty to 
sign the bill passed by Congress." " If 
you are elected President," again asked the 
reporter, " will you sign such a bill if Con- 
gress passes it I " Greeley replied, "I cer- 
tainly will." 

Greeley formally accepted the nomination 
in due order, and, on May 15, printed a card 
in the Tribune announcing that, from that 
date, he had "withdrawn absolutely from the 
conduct of the Tribune and would hence- 
forth, until further notice, exercise no con- 
trol or supervision over its columns." 

Although Greeley and his personal fol- 
lowers did not realize it, the disintegration 
of the body that nominated him began with 
the declaration of the final ballot. This was 
indicated by the press comments. The Na- 
tion, which spoke for the supporters of the, 
Liberal movement who considered Adams the 
type of candidate to represent them, and who 
could not be allured from revenue and civil 
246 



Greeley's Presidential Campaign 

service reform, repudiated the Cincinnati 
ticket at once, saying, "The convention has 
offered us a candidate of undoubted personal 
honesty, who is, and has long been, associ- 
ated intimately with the worst set of politi- 
cians the State contains — excepting the Tam- 
many ring — whose supporters at the conven- 
tion included some of the worst political 
trash to be found anywhere, who would, in 
all possibility be followed by them to Wash- 
ington, and who, if left in their hands there, 
would set up the most corrupt administration 
ever seen, and that from which least might 
be expected in the way of administrative re- 
form; who is not more remarkable for his 
generosity and kindheartedness than for the 
facility with which he is duped, and not more 
remarkable for his hatred of knavery than 
for the difficulty he has in telling whether a 
man is a knave or not." The New York Even- 
ing Post,* which would have supported Ad- 
ams with enthusiasm, rejected Greeley with 

• A conference of Republicans opposed to Grant's adminis- 
tration and not satisfied with Greeley was held, at the invi- 
tation of Carl Schurz, J. D. Cox, William Cullen Bryant, Os- 
wald Ottendorfer, David A. Wells, and J. Brinkerhoff, at the 
Fifth Avenue Hotel, in New York, on June 20, and William 
S. Groesbeck, of Ohio, was nominated for President, and Fred- 
erick Law Olmstead for Vice-President. But there the matter 
ended. Schurz later made speeches for Greeley. 

247 



Horace Greeley 



scorn, Mr. Bryant writing the editorial which 
stated "Why Mr. Greeley should not be sup- 
ported for the Presidency," the reasons being 
his lack of courage, firmness, and consist- 
ency; his bad political associations (espe- 
cially his alliance with Senator Fenton) ; his 
want of settled political convictions, except 
on the subject of the tariff, and "the gross- 
ness of his manners." 

But to the candidate, and perhaps to his 
campaign managers, all this objection seemed 
trivial after his acceptance, on the Cincinnati 
platform, by the Democratic National Con- 
vention on the ninth of July. To one of his 
associate editors who announced to him his 
nomination by the Democratic convention he 
remarked, " I shall carry every Southern 
State but South Carolina. That they will 
steal from me." 

Naturally, there was considerable appre- 
hension on the part of the Republicans when 
the campaign opened. If Greeley could poll 
the Democratic vote, the addition of not a 
very large number of Republicans would se- 
cure for him several important States. In 
1872 Maine held her State election in Septem- 
ber, and Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana 
held theirs in October. To these States the 
whole country looked for the first indication 
248 



Greeley's Presidential Campaign 

of public sentiment on the new alinement. 
Maine responded with a Republican majority 
of a little over 17,000. The Tribune, to make 
the best of this, estimated the reduction of 
the previous Republican majority in the 
State by the Liberal movement at 5 per cent, 
and said, "The lesson, then, of the Maine 
election is plain. It reveals a percentage of 
change which, with proper organization and 
work, gives us Pennsylvania and Indiana in 
October. After these, the battle wins itself." 
When, in October, Pennsylvania gave a Re- 
publican majority of 40,443, and Ohio a Re- 
publican majority of 14,150, while Indiana 
gave Hendricks, the Democratic-Liberal, 
1,148 majority, the Tribune counted 178 elec- 
toral votes for Greeley, 119 for Grant, and 69 
in doubt, and said, "This leaves us but 6 
votes to win from the doubtful States; it 
leaves Grant 65. On that showing, who can 
doubt which side the chances lie? Courage, 
friends. The enemy have done their worst. 
We have wrested Indiana from their grasp; 
the way to final victory is clear." 

This sort of journalism was more in vogue 
thirty years ago than it is now, but even then 
it really deceived no one but Greeley. He, 
up to the announcement of the result, seemed 
to have no doubt of his election, and to deem 
249 



Horace Greeley 



himself thousands of votes stronger in these 
States than were the State candidates. The 
managers of the Liberal canvass early real- 
ized the trend of public opinion, and they de- 
cided that Greeley should set out on a speech- 
making tour. Starting on September 18, he 
spoke in Pennsylvania and Ohio on his way 
to Cincinnati, where he made two elaborate 
addresses. On the return trip he spoke in 
Kentucky and Indiana, and again in Ohio 
and Pennsylvania. He presented himself as 
the champion of universal amnesty, and was 
cheered and encouraged by the friendly re- 
ception which he everywhere received. 

The Republican campaign managers, of 
whom perhaps Senator Roscoe Conkling was 
the leader, made the attacks on President 
Grant their keynote, defending the purity of 
his personal character and motives, and hold- 
ing up Greeley as weakly inconsistent when 
seeking the presidency on a platform adopt- 
ed by revenue reformers, and as the candi- 
date, not only of discontented Republicans, 
but of his lifelong opponents, the Democrats. 
In no presidential campaign did the cartoon- 
ists ever take so large a part. Greeley was 
a good subject for their witty pencils, and 
they dealt him some effective blows; for a 
really telling cartoon can carry home an ar- 
250 



Greeley's Presidential Campaign 

gument more forcibly and instantly than the 
most carefully prepared address. 

When the November returns came in, 
Greeley found that he was the most thor- 
oughly beaten candidate, so far as the elec- 
toral vote was concerned, who had ever run 
for President of the United States. Georgia, 
Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, Tennessee, 
and Texas alone gave him their votes. Penn- 
sylvania, which had given the Eepublican 
candidate for judge 40,443 majority in Oc- 
tober, gave Grant 137,548; Ohio increased 
her October Republican majority of 14,150 to 
37,531; and Indiana changed the small Lib- 
eral-Democratic majority to a Republican 
majority of 22,515. Greeley's own State gave 
a majority of 53,456 against him, and the 
majority for Grant in the whole country was 
762,991. 

Many things contributed to this result. 
There are prominent participants in the Lib- 
eral movement of 1872 still living who think 
that, if Adams had been the choice of the 
Cincinnati convention, he would have been 
elected. Adams would have retained the sup- 
port of a good many earnest and consistent 
reformers who could not vote for Greeley, 
and he would probably have proved less dis- 
tasteful to Democrats than Greeley was 
251 



Horace Greeley 

found to be. But all such calculations have 
to reckon with U. S. Grant. Unfortunate 
as he was in many of the incidents of his 
first term administration, in the popular eye 
he was the general whose persistency and 
faith in the final result — whose generalship 
— had crushed the rebellion. He might lack 
experience in choosing civil oflQcers. He 
might stand up too firmly for his friends. 
He might give Federal support to unworthy 
Republicans in the South. He might, in a 
word, be attacked on this ground and on that. 
But so had been the early fathers of the re- 
public, whose names were now enshrined in 
the list of national heroes. To elect Greeley, 
to elect Adams, it was necessary to defeat 
Grant, and that was as hard a task in civil as 
in military movements. 

Greeley counted on the support of that 
large body of men whom he had so long ad- 
dressed with his pen, and especially of the 
agricultural classes. But he had been ad- 
dressing these men in defense of principles 
which had, for almost twenty years, been 
identical with the Republican party. The 
men who admired him as the opponent of 
slavery extension, as the defender of home 
productions, as the teacher of temperance, 
as the spokesman for the farmer, had fol- 
252 



Greeley's Presidential Campaign 

lowed his lead for many years as the most 
influential Republican editor of the country. 
The war feeling was by no means extin- 
guished. Distrust of the South had not yet 
disappeared. It was counting on a great un- 
certainty, therefore, for Greeley to expect to 
lead out of his old party's ranks, in 1872, the 
body of Republicans who had taken their po- 
litical instruction from his pen. The task 
would have been an easier one before the 
war. But, while Greeley's electoral vote was 
small, his popular vote reached 2,834,079, 
and this was large enough to account for the 
continued devotion of all his strictly personal 
following. 

The Tribune, on November 7, printed a 
card from Greeley announcing his resump- 
tion of the editorship "which he relinquished 
on embarking in another line of business six 
months ago," and saying that it would be his 
effort to make the paper "a thoroughly inde- 
pendent journal, treating all parties and po- 
litical movements with judicial fairness and 
candor, but courting the favor and depreca- 
ting the wrath of no one." He would gladly 
say anything he could to unite the whole peo- 
ple on a platform of universal amnesty and 
impartial suffrage, but for the present he 
could do most for that end by silence. As he 
253 



Horace Greeley 



would never again be a candidate for office, lie 
would give more regard to science, industry, 
and the useful arts, and would "not be pro- 
voked to indulgence in those bitter person- 
alities which are the recognized bane of jour- 
nalism." 

This same issue of the Tribune contained 
a remarkable editorial headed Crumbs of 
Comfort. In this it was set forth that for 
twelve years the Tribune had been supposed 
to keep "for the benefit of the idle and inca- 
pable a sort of Federal employment agency. 
. . . Any man who had ever voted the Re- 
publican ticket believed that it was the duty 
and the privilege of the editor of this paper 
to get him a place in the custom-house. 
Every red-nosed politician who had cheated 
at the caucus and fought at the polls looked 
to the editor of the Tribune to secure him ap- 
pointment as gager, or as army chaplain, or 
as minister to France. ... It is a source of 
profound satisfaction to us that office-seek- 
ers will keep aloof from a defeated candidate 
who has not influence enough at Washington 
or at Albany to get a sweeper appointed un- 
der the sergeant-at-arms, or a deputy sub- 
assistant temporary clerk into the paste-pot 
section of the folding-room. At last we shall 
be let alone to mind our own affairs and man- 
254 



Greeley's Presidential Campaign 

age our own newspaper, without being called 
aside every hour to help lazy people whom 
we don't know, and to spend our strength in 
efforts that only benefit people who don't de- 
serve assistance. At last we shall keep our 
office clear of blatherskites and political beg- 
gars." 

Such a declaration could not fail to give 
pain to the venerable editor of the Trib- 
une for more reasons than one. It pictured 
his editorial room as a sort of office-broker- 
age shop; it offended many of his friends 
who might consider themselves classed 
among the "red-nosed"; it counted him out 
of the list of future political advisers. His 
action was characteristic. As soon as he read 
the article he penned the following, and sent 
it up to the composing-room: "By some 
unaccountable fatality, an article entitled 
Crumbs of Comfort crept into our last, un- 
seen by the editor, which does him the gross- 
est wrong. It is true that office-seekers used 
to pester him for recommendations when his 
friends controlled the custom-house, though 
the ' red-nosed ' variety were seldom found 
among them; it is not true that he ever 
obeyed a summons to Washington in order 
that he might promote or oppose legislation 
in favor of this or that private scheme. In 
255 



Horace Greeley 



short, the article is a monstrous fable, based 
on some other experience than that of any 
editor of this journal." ^ This retraction did 
not appear in the Tribune. It was so severe 
a rebuke to the writer and publisher of the 
Crumbs of Comfort that Greeley was urged 
not to insist on its publication, on the ground 
that the matter would be soonest forgotten 
if it was simply dropped. In earlier years 
he would have asserted his authority and his 
judgment; now, crushed by his defeat, he 
yielded. 

In the last week of November the country 
was shocked to hear that Horace Greeley was 
critically ill, and he died at 6.50 p. m. on No- 
vember 29, 1872. His wife had been taken to 
Chappaqua, a helpless invalid, a short time 
before the date of the election, and he had 
watched by her bedside day and night. The 
Tribune in announcing his death said: "His 
incessant watch around the dying pillow of 
his wife had well-nigh destroyed the power 
of sleep. Symptoms of extreme nervous 
prostration gradually became apparent. His 
appetite was gone. The stomach rejected 
food. The free use of his faculties was dis- 



' A facsimile of this paragraph was printed in the New 
York Boycotter in November, 1884. 

256 





statue in Greeley Square. 



His Death 

turbed, and he sank with a rapidity that, even 
to those who watched him closest, seemed 
startling." In one of Greeley's Letters to 
a Lady Friend (published in 1893), he wrote, 
under date of November 8, 1872, "As to my 
wife's death, I do not count it. Her suffer- 
ings since she returned to me were so terrible 
that I rather felt relieved when she peace- 
fully slept the long sleep. . . . Nor do I care 
for defeat, however crushing. I dread only 
the malignity with which I am hounded, and 
the possibility that it may ruin the Tribune. 
My enemies mean to kill that; if they would 
kill me instead I would thank them lovingly. 
And so many of my old friends hate me for 
what I have done that life seems hard to 
bear." 

His own words tell the story of his death. 
"Mr. Greeley," said Dr. Cuyler in his me- 
morial sermon, "died of a broken heart." He 
had seen the realization of a great ambition 
within his reach, and had been disappointed. 
Had he been elected, the campaign criticisms 
of old friends who had not followed him in his 
departure from the Republican ranks would 
have been forgotten in the mapping out of 
the policy to which he would have devoted 
himself, and his paper would have had a new 
status as the organ of the Federal admin- 
18 257 



Horace Greeley 



istration. But, cast down by his defeat — a 
rejected leader — the personal criticisms were 
killing, and it was only natural that he, with 
others, should fear for the future of the 
journal of his creation, which, he might sup- 
pose, must now look to a new constituency for 
support. 

But in his death all the animosities of the 
recent campaign were forgotten. New York 
city realized that it had lost its citizen whose 
renown was widest, and whose fame was 
most intimately associated with the metrop- 
olis, and the whole nation, through press and 
pulpit, paid tribute to his personal honesty 
and the purity of his aims. The body lay in 
state for a day in the City Hall, where it was 
viewed by more than fifty thousand persons, 
and among the attendants at the funeral were 
the President and Vice-President of the 
United States, Chief Justice Chase, and lead- 
ing United States Senators. The burial took 
place in Greenwood Cemetery, Brooklyn. 
The printers of the United States began at 
once a movement to erect over his grave a 
bust of the veteran editor made of melted 
newspaper type, and such a bust, designed 
by Charles Calverly, was unveiled there on 
December 4, 1876. The Common Council of 
the city, as their tribute, voted to name the 
258 



His Death 

little triangle at Broadway and Thirty-third 
Street "Greeley Square," and there a Greeley 
statue, by Alexander Doyle, was unveiled by 
the "Horace Greeley Statue Committee " on 
May 30, 1894. 



259 



INDEX 



ABO 

ABOLITIONISTS, defined, 124 ; 
ultra views of, 125-127; Gree- 
ley on, 128, 129, 135, 136, 156, 178. 
Adams, Charles Francis, candi- 
date before the Liberal Republi- 
can Convention, 235. 
Adams-Jackson campaign, 16. 
American Laborer (magazine), 115. 

BANKING, Greeley on, in New 
Yorker, 35-38. 

Banks speakership contest, 166. 

Bates, Edward, Greeley's candi- 
date for presidential nomination, 
179. 

Beggars, Greeley's experience 
with, 106-108. 

Benjamin, Park, work on New 
Yorker, 29 ; advice to Greeley, 67. 

Bennett, James Gordon, offer to 
Greeley, 26 ; Greeley on, 67. 

Blaine, J. G., motion for amnesty, 
220. 

Blunt, Joseph, 115. 

Brisbane, Albert, Greeley's sup- 
port of, 79-84. 

Brook Farm, 81. 

Brown, B. Gratz, leader in Liberal 
Republican movement, 227, 228 ; 
candidate for presidential nomi- 
nation, 235 ; withdrawal in favor 
of Greeley, 241-243. 

Brown, John, raid, 168. 

Bryant, William Cullen, 200, 248. 



CUR 

CALHOUN, John C, for Texas 
annexation, 142 ; Greeley's 
reply to, 154. 

CaUfornia statehood question, 156- 
160. 

Carpetbagger scandals, 216, 226. 

Cass, presidential candidate, 151. 

Chappaqua farm, 92. 

Clark, Lewis Gaylord, on Greeley, 
46 note. 

— , Myron H., candidate for Gov- 
ernor, 173. 

Clay, Henry, Weed's opposition to, 
in 1839, 45 ; Greeley's love of, 46, 
119 ; tariff views, 110-113 ; presi- 
dential campaign of 1844, 119, 
120 ; Greeley's choice in 1848, 
148 ; defended as a slaveholder, 
126, 144, 145 ; on Texas annexa- 
tion, 142 ; Compromise of 1850, 
151-163. 

Cochran, John, nominated for 
Vice-President, 199. 

Coggeshall, James, loan to Gree- 
ley, 59. 

Compromise of 1850, 151-163. 

Congdon, C. T., 72. 

ConstitutionaUst, Greeley's work 
for, 26. 

Cooper libel suits, 11, 68. 

Crandall, Miss, opposition to her 
plan for negro education, 
132. 

Curtis, George William, 72. 



261 



Horace Greeley 



DAL 

DALLAS, vote on tariff, 121. 
Dana, Charles A., 72, 82, 105. 

Davis, Judge David, candidate for 
presidential nomination, 235. 

Davis, Jefferson, Greeley on, 218, 
220-222. 

Depew, C. M., anecdote of Greeley, 
107. 

De Tocqueville on early American 
newspapers, 27. 

Douglas, Stephen A., in the Kan- 
sas-Nebraska contest, 1C3-165 ; 
Greeley favors for Senator, 178. 

Dred Scott decision, 168. 

EVENING Post, 111, 154 note. 
Express newsgathering, 73- 



F ARMING, Greeley on, 91-93. 
Fillmore signs compromise 
bills, 160. 

Finances, Federal and State, Gree- 
ley on, in the New Yorker, 35-38. 

Fourierism, Greeley's beUef in, 79- 
84 ; later views, 85 ; Fourier As- 
sociation formed, 81. 

Foxes' stances, 90. 

Fremont campaign of 1856, 167 ; 
nominated for President in 1864, 
199. 

Frye, W. H., 72, 106. 

Fugitive slaves, 144 ; compromise 
act, 160-163. 

Fuller, Margaret, 72, 82 ; member 
of Greeley's family, 88 : contri- 
butions to the Tribune, 88, 89. 

GARRISON, William Lloyd, 
abolition views, 126, 127 ; on 
Greeley, 171. 
Gay, Sidney Howard, 72, 187, 210. 
Greeley, Horace, landing in New 
York city, 2, 20 ; early farm ex- 
perience, 3-5 ; his mother, 3, 10 ; 
education, 6-8 ; precocity, 7 ; 



ORE 
▼lews of college education, 8 ; 
attraction to the printer's trade, 
9 ; personal appearance, 11, 12, 
19, 22 ; first newspaper writing, 
13 ; views on journalism, 15 ; in- 
terest in politics, 16 ; a protection- 
ist when a boy, 16 ; amusements, 
17 ; non-user of intoxicants and 
tobacco, 18 ; employment in New 
York State and Pennsylvania, 19; 
first experiences in New York 
city, 21-24 ; partnership with 
Story, 24-26; offer by Bennett, 
26 ; starts New Yorker, 27 ; his 
work on, 29 ; idea of newspaper 
work, 30 ; a poet, 32 ; editorial 
views in the New Yorker, 33-37 ; 
on "clean" journaUsm, 34, 66; 
State and Federal finances, 35- 
38 ; financial straits, 38, 39 ; first 
meeting with Weed, 42 ; the two 
men contrasted, 44-40 ; edits the 
Jeffersonian, 47^9 ; work for the 
Whig (newspaper), 47 ; on State 
committee, 48 ; edits the Log 
Cabin, 50-52 ; its business man- 
agement, 52, 54 ; last of the New 
Yorker, 54, 55 ; on the civil serv- 
ice, 51 ; absent-mindedness, 54 ; 
on the failure of the New Yorker, 
55 ; estimate of New York Trib- 
une, 56 ; equipment for editing, 
56 ; contributor to Madisonian, 
57 ; on the country press, 58 ; 
plan of the Tribune, 58, 60 ; Har- 
ri.son's death, 60 , birth and early 
struggles of the Tribune, 61 ; 
partnership with McElrath, 62 ; 
on Henry J. Raymond, 64 ; labor 
on the Tribune, 65, 69 ; views of 
the stage, 65 ; use of epithets, 67, 
154 note ; report of Cooper libel 
suit, 68 ; newspaper versatility, 
71 ; associates, 72 ; value of his 
"isms" to the Tribune, 76; his 
view of Independent thinking, 



262 



Index 



ORE 

76-78, 83, 146; refusal to be guided 
by Weed, 78 ; early sympathy 
with socialism, 79 ; support of 
Brisbane's Fourierism, 79-84 ; 
director of North American 
Phalanx, 81 ; discussion with 
Raymond, 84 ; later views ou 
socialism, 84-86 ; acceptance of 
Graham's dietetic doctrine, 86 
residence on the East River, 88 
Margaret Fuller's views, 88, 89 
opinion of spiritualism, 89-91 
views on farming, 91-93 ; at 
Chappaqua, 92 ; sympathy with 
Ireland and Hungary, 93 ; as 
counselor-at-large, 94 ; his lec- 
tures, 95-97 ; member of Con- 
gress, 98-103, 151 ; visits to Lon- 
don and Paris, 104 ; how he "ed- 
ited" the Tribune, 105; letters 
to Dana, 105, 106 ; experience 
with beggars, 106-108 ; editorial- 
room pictures, 108, 109 ; advocate 
of a protective tariff, 110-122; 
views of President Tyler, 113, 
114 ; early prominence as a pro- 
tection advocate, 115 ; his tariff 
principles, 116-118 ; support of 
Clay in 1844, 119, 120 ; plague of 
boils, 120 ; Clay his choice in 
1848, 122, 148 ; part in the aboli- 
tion of slavery, 123 ; party influ- 
ence over, 125, 129 ; his idea of 
conservatism, 126 ; defense of 
Clay as a slaveholder, 126, 144, 
145 ; opinions of the Abolition- 
ists, 128, 129, 135, 136, 143, 156, 
178 ; the Tribune's influence in 
the slavery contest, 133 ; early 
views on slavery, 134-136 ; on the 
murder of Lovejoy, 136 ; on 
Texas annexation, 137-148 ; list- 
less support of Taylor, 148-151; 
defiance of New York " business 
interests," 149-151, 161, 162 ; op- 
position to slavery in Congress, 

263 



* GRE 

151 ; Compromise of 1850, 151- 
163 ; reply to Calhoun, 154 ; on 
Webster's 7th of March speech, 

158 ; abandons Wilmot proviso, 

159 ; on fugitive slave law, 161- 
163 ; favors Scott's nomination, 
163 ; on Kansas-Nebraska con- 
test, 163, 165 ; early attitude 
toward Republican party, 166, 
178 ; attack by Rust, 166 ; on 
Fremont's defeat, 167 ; Dred 
Scott decision, 168 ; Lecompton 
contest, 168 ; John Brown raid, 
168 ; on office-holding editors, 
171, 172, 175 ; desire for guberna- 
torial nomination, 172, 173, 176 ; 
advocacy of prohibition, 172 ; 
complaint to Seward, 173 ; letter 
dissolving the " firm of Seward, 
Weed, and Greeley," 174-177; fa- 
vors Douglas for Senator, 178 ; 
delegate to National Repubhcan 
Convention of 1860, 179 ; prefer- 
ence for Bates, 179 ; reason for 
opposing Seward's nomination, 
179, 183 : Raymond's letter, 180- 
182 ; defeated for United States 
Senator, State Comptroller, and 
Congress, 182, 183 ; not a candi- 
date for office under Lincoln, 
184 ; justifies the right to secede, 
184-187 ; " Forward to Rich- 
mond" cry, 188, 189; letter to 
Lincoln after Bull Run, 190 ; 
efforts for foreign mediation, 
193-196 ; Prayer of Twenty Mil- 
lions, 196-198 ; opposition to Lin- 
coln's renomination, 199-201 ; 
proposed withdrawal of Lincoln's 
name, 201 ; a faultfinder, 202 ; 
Niagara Falls negotiations, 203- 
208; letter to Lincohi, 208; a 
suppressed editorial, 210, 211 ; 
final view of Lincoln, 212, 213 ; 
for universal amnesty and im- 
partial suffrage, 217-226; de- 



Horace Greeley 



GRB 

stroys his chance for United 
States Senator, 818 ; on Jefferson 
Davis, 218, 220-222 ; on President 
Johnson's course, 219 ; action of 
Union League Club, 221, 222 
address in Richmond, 223-225 
trip to Texas, 225 ; failure as a 
prophet, 225 ; signs letter in fa 
vor of Liberal movement, 234 
candidate before the Liberal Re 
pubUcan Convention, 235-243 
nominated for President, 244 
acceptance of tarifC plank, 246 
■withdrawal from Tribune, 246 
speech-making tour, 250 ; his de 
feat and its causes, 251-253 ; re 
Bumes Tribune editorship, 253 
Crumbs of Comfort editorial 
254-256 ; his death and its cause 
256-258; bust and statue, 258 
259. 

Greeley, Mrs. Horace, her hus- 
band's first acquaintance with, 
87 ; a Grahamite, 87; admirer of 
Margaret Fuller, 88 ; acceptance 
of spiritualism, 90 ; requirements 
at Chappaqua, 93 ; her death, 
256, 257. 

— , Zacheus, 2-5, 10. 

Godkin, E. L., on Greeley's nomi- 
nation, 236, 247. 

Godwin, Parke, 83, 116. 

Graham, Sylvester, dietetic doc- 
trine, 86. 

Grant, U. S., causes of Republican 
opposition to, 214 ; sides with 
Missouri radicals, 228. 

Griswold, R. W., work on New 
Yorker, 29. 

HARRISON, campaign of 1840, 
49-52 ; death of, as affecting 
the Tribune, 60. 
Hay, John, messenger to Greeley, 

205, 207. 
Hildretb, the historian, 72. 



LIN 
Hoffman, C. H., work on New 

Yorker, 29. 
Howe, James, 24. 
Hungary, Greeley's sympathy 

with, 93. 

IRELAND, Greeley's sympathy 
with, 93. 

JACKSON-Adams campaign, 16. 
Jeffersonian (newspaper), 42, 
43, 47-49. 

Jewett, W. C, part in Niagara 
FaUs negotiations. 203-208. 

"Jim Crow" cars in Massachu- 
setts, 131. 

Johnson, President Andrew, Gree- 
ley on, 219. 

Jones, George, 13. 

Journalism, the best school, 14; 
country, 15, 58 ; ofiQce-holding 
editors, 171, 172. 

KANSAS - Nebraska question, 
163-165. 
Kuklux, Greeley on, 226. 

T ECTURES, Greeley's, 95-97; 

-'— ^ early lecture field, 95. 

Liberal Republican movement, 
origin of, 226-229; Sumner's part, 
230-232 ; how tariff question in- 
volved, 232-234 ; Cincinnati con- 
vention, 234-244 ; platform, 239 ; 
balloting, 242-244 ; Greeley's 
nomination, 244 ; early dissolu- 
tion of the movement, 246, 247. 

Lincoln, Abraham, Greeley's pref- 
erence for Douglas, 178 ; caution 
to Greeley, 186 ; Greeley's letter 
to, after Bull Run, 190-192 ; reply 
to Greeley's Prayer of Twenty 
Millions, 197; Greeley's opposi- 
tion to his renomination, 199-202 ; 
part in Niagara Falls negotia- 
tion, 203-208 ; suppressed edito- 



264 



Index 



LOG 
rial on, 210 ; Greeley's final view 
of, 212, 213. 

Log Cabin (newspaper), how start- 
ed, 50 ; its character, 50-52 ; big 
circulation, 52. 

Lottery ticket selling, 26. 

Love joy, E. P., murder of, 136. 

— , Owen, on emancipation procla- 
mation, 198 note. 

MADISONIAN (newspaper), in- 
vitation to Greeley, 57. 

McElrath, T., partner in the Tri- 
bune, 62. 

Mercier, Greeley's approach to, 
193. 

Mileage abuse, Greeley's attack 
on, 99-103. 

Missouri compromise, 127. 

Missouri, Liberal Republican move- 
ment in, 226-230. 

Morning Post, 25. 

nSTEBRASKA question, 163-165. 

-^^ Negro education. Northern 
opposition to, 132. 

Newspapers, early, in the United 
States, 27 ; New York city in 
1842, 58 ; Greeley on the " Satan- 
ic press," 66. 

New York city in 1830, 1 ; literary 
tastes in 1828, 28 ; bank suspen- 
sions in 1837, 37 ; newspapers in 
1842, 58. 

New Yorker started, 27; character 
of, 30-34 ; topics discussed, 35-38 ; 
a financial failure, 38, 39 ; last 
days, 54, 55 ; on slavery and the 
Abolitionists, 134-136 ; on Love- 
joy's murder, 136 ; on Texas an- 
nexation, 143. 

Niagara Falls peace negotiations, 
203-208. 

Northern Spectator, Greeley's em- 
ployment on, 10-16, 19. 

Noyes's Academy, attack on, 132. 



SHE 
TDAPER money, laborers' oppo- 
-*- sition to, 36 note. 
Phalanx, North American, 81, 82. 
Polk, J. K., election of, 120 ; letter 

to Kane, 121. 
Porter, W. T., 24. 

Prayer of Twenty Millions, 196-198. 
Prohibition, Greeley's advocacy of, 

172. 

/^UINCY, Edmund, 78. 

RAYMOND, Henry J., concern- 
ing the New Yorker, 29 ; 
Greeley's assistant, 64 ; discus- 
sion on Fourierism, 84 ; founds 
New York Times, 94 ; Lieutenant- 
Governor, 173; letter on Greeley's 
opposition to Seward's nomina- 
tion, 180-182 ; on Greeley's media- 
tion schemes, 195, 196 ; reports 
Republican platform, 204. 

Redfield, J. S., 24. 

Republican party, founding of, 
166 ; Greeley's attitude toward, 
166. 

Ripley, George, 72, 83. 

SCOTT, Gen. W., Tribune favors 
his nomination, 163. 

Schurz, Carl, part in Liberal move- 
ment in Missouri, 227, 228, 230 ; 
chairman Liberal national con- 
vention, 241. 

Secession, the right of, 184. 

Seward, William H., Greeley's com- 
plaint to, 173 ; dissolution of 
"firm of Seward, Weed, and 
Greeley," 174-176 ; letter to 
Weed, 177 ; Greeley's objection 
to his nomination, 179 ; Secretary 
of State, 184 ; reply to Mercier, 
193-195 ; on Greeley's negotia- 
tions, 196. 

Shepard, H. D.'s, Morning Post, 25. 



265 



Horace Greeley 



SLA 

Slavery, Greeley's part in its abo- 
lition, 123 ; Abolitionists defined, 
124 ; their erratic views, 125 ; 
early antislavery societies, 130 ; 
Northern attitude, 128-136 ; the 
Triljune's influence as an oppo- 
nent of slavery, 133 ; Lovejoy's 
murder, 136 ; Texas annexation, 
137-148; Supreme Court decision, 
144 ; Greeley's rebukes of New 
York "business interests," 149, 
161 ; Greeley's attitude in Con- 
gress, 151 ; Compromise of 1850, 
152-163 ; conference of Southern 
Congressmen, 154-156 ; talk of 
disunion, 156, 162 ; Dred Scott de- 
cision, 168 ; John Brown raid, 
168; emancipation proclamation, 
196-198. 

Socialism, Greeley's views, 79-86. 

Spirit of the Times (newspaper), 24. 

Spiritualism, Greeley's views on, 
89-91. 

Stage, Greeley's views on, 65. 

Story, Francis, 24. 

Sumner, Charles, quarrel with 
Grant, 230-232. 

Sun (newspaper). Tribune "war" 
with, 63. 

Sylvania enterprise, 82. 

Sylvester, S. J., 24. 

TARIFF, Greeley's views on, 110- 
122 ; compromise of 1833, 110- 
113; Tyler's position, 113, 114; 
the leading political issue, 114; 
Greeley's early advocacy of pro- 
tection, 115-118 ; Clay campaign 
of 1844, 119, 120 ; Polk's position, 
121 ; R. J. Walker's views, 121 ; 
tariff vs. slavery, 161 ; part in the 
Liberal Republican campaign of 
1372,232-234 ; Liberal Republican 
plank, 240 ; Greeley's acceptance 
of it, 246. 
Taylor, Bayard, 72, 96. 



TRI 

Taylor, Gen. Z., Greeley's listless 
support of, 148-151 ; on admission 
of California, 157. 

Temperance, Greeley's views, 18, 
172. 

Texas annexation, 137-148. 

Tilden, SamuelJ., 116. 

Times, New York, started, 94. 

Tribune, New York, Greeley's esti- 
mate of, 56 ; his plan of, 58-60 ; 
capital to start with, 59 ; its birth 
and early struggles, 61 ; weekly 
and semi editions begun, 62, 63 ; 
price, 63 ; war with the Sun, 63 ; 
its news character, 65-67 ; growth 
of subscriptions and advertise- 
ments, 69, 70 ; source of its influ- 
ence, 71 ; associate editors, 72 ; 
express news-gathering, 73-76 ; 
value of Greeley's " isms," 76 ; 
Brisbane's contributions, 80 ; 
support of Association scheme, 
81 ; women's suffrage, 89 ; on 
spiritualism, 90, 91 ; its agricul- 
tural department, 91 ; 'exposure 
of mileage abuse, 100 ; Greeley's 
thorough editing, 103 ; on Tyler's 
tariff bill veto, 114 ; Clay edition, 
119 ; part in the antislavery con- 
test, 123 ; on the Abolitionists, 
129, 156 ; on fugitive slaves, 144 ; 
position on slavery question 
stated, 145, 147 ; on Texas an- 
nexation, 145-148 ; listless sup- 
port of Taylor, 148, 149, 151 ; re- 
buke of New York " business in- 
terests," 149, 161 ; on Van Buren- 
Adaras ticket, 151 ; on campaign 
of 1850, 157 ; on Webster's 7th 
of March speech, 158 ; on Kan- 
sas-Nebraska question, 163-165 ; 
Virginia indictment of, 167 ; on 
Dred Scott decision and John 
Brown's raid, 168 ; advocacy of 
the Maine law, 172 ; service to 
Seward, 174 ; on the right to se- 



266 



Ind 



ex 



TYL 

cede, 184-187 ; office attacked by 
a mob, 187 ; "Forward to Rich- 
mond" cry, 188; hopes for 
Grant's administration, 214 ; 
causes of its later hostility, 215 ; 
on amnesty, 217 ; reports and 
comments during the Liberal 
Republican convention, 237-239 ; 
Greeley's withdrawal from, 246 ; 
editorials during Liberal cam- 
paign, 248, 249 ; Greeley's return 
to, 253 ; Crumbs of Comfort edi- 
torial, 254-256 ; Greeley's fear 
for, 257. 
Tyler, President John, tariff recom- 
mendations, 113 ; Tribune's sup- 
port of, 113 ; Greeley's view of, 
113, 114, 146 ; veto of tariff bill, 
114 ; on Texas annexation, 140- 
142. 

UNION League Club, proposed 
action against Greeley, 221, 
222. 
Universal amnesty, 217. 
Upshur, A. P., Secretary of State, 
a Texas annexationist, 141. 

VALLANDIGHAM, Greeley's 
reported correspondence 
with, 195. 
Van Buren, Martin, Greeley'a 
thrust at, 51 ; tariff views. 111 ; 
Free Soil candidate, 127 ; on 
Texas question, 140, 142, 143 ; 
Van Buren-Adams ticket, 151. 



YOU 

WALKER, R. J., tariff views, 
121. 

Webb, James Watson, on Greeley's 
dress, 11. 

Webster, Daniel, on Texas ques- 
tion, 138, 139, 141 ; 7th of March 
speech, 153-158. 

Weed, Thurlow, founding of the 
Albany Journal, 40 ; first meet- 
ing with Greeley, 42 ; the Jeffer- 
sonian, 43 ; Weed and Greeley 
contrasted, 44, 46 ; Clay's defeat 
in 1837, 45 ; discovery of Greeley, 
46 ; Greeley's independence of, 
78 ; on Greeley's proposed nomi- 
nation for Governor, 172 ; Gree- 
ley's complaints to Seward, 173- 
176 ; Seward's letter to, 177 ; on 
Greeley's letter to Seward, 182 ; 
defeats Greeley's chances for 
ofSce, 182. 

Whig (daily newspaper), 47. 

— party, 1836 to 1840, 41-62 ; final 
defeat of, 163. 

White, Horace, on New York bank- 
ing laws, 35 ; reports Liberal Re- 
publican platform, 239. 

Wilmot proviso, Greeley on, 158, 
159. 

Wilson, Henry, on Greeley, 166, 187. 

Winchester, Jonas, 26. 

Women's suffrage, Greeley on, 89. 

Wood, Fernando, proposed seces- 
sion of New York city, 185. 



Y 



OUNG, John Russell, on 
Grant's administration, 214. 



(1) 



THE END 



267 



THREE IMPORTANT BOOKS. 



Recollections of the Civil War. 

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